My Waterloo: Meringue Pies

This post is a few days late, since I have been busy with some other things, but I made another lemon meringue pie last Sunday for the pie project. I am definitely queen of pie pastry, my mother is now complimenting me on how good it is. But I still can’t get the meringue right.

It seems that I have made every conceivable mistake you can make with meringue, and every time I think I’ve made them all and NOW have mastered it, I go right back to the beginning and start making the mistakes again. Are meringue pies my Waterloo? Will I never be able to make one that is perfect? (You’ll remember the one time I had perfect meringue, the filling did not set properly).

So, to remind me and perhaps inform you, here are the keys to making a lemon meringue pie with perfect meringue:

1. Do not overbeat or heat the meringue. Beat the meringues til stiff and glossy and not a second more.

2. Make sure the meringue is not only spread to the edges of the pie, but is firmly stuck to the edge of the pie crust, all the way around the pie. This helps not only with weeping, but keeps the meringue from shrinking away from the pie crust. (This is one of the two mistakes I made last weekend).

3. Try to get the filling and the meringue to the same temperature as much as you can before putting it in the oven to brown. This will help with weeping.

4. Finally, (and here is a new one for me, based on last weekend’s mistakes) don’t make your peaks too high on the meringue, or they will burn before the rest of the meringue browns.

It’s very simple when it’s written out this way, but as I said, it’s been a challenge for me. My mum suggested that my problems with meringue pies are psychological. Maybe they are, though I don’t know what that means for me, exactly–?

Death to spitbugs!! And some other stuff

This morning I went to a funeral. The food was waaaay better than the other one mentioned in this blog, where I was helping out in the kitchen. The odd thing was, I had three people there mention to me how much they love an assortment of tiny sandwiches with the crusts off. That’s never been a thing of mine, but there must be many people in the world who secretly feel that way, if I can have three people at one funeral all tell me that when faced with platters of miniature sandwiches.

I came home and did some work in the garden, mostly spraying the lavender bushes with insecticidal soap. We have a massive infestation of spitbugs, all over the huge lavender bushes on the front of the property, just now coming into bloom. So I took it upon myself to get rid of them. In case you don’t know what they are, spitbugs are small. They sit on the green stems of plants, preferably sheltered by a leaf or two, and then create a big white foamy environment, in which they can dwell. That foam looks like spit–ergo, spitbugs.

I planned to do some work on my quilt but didn’t get that much done. For those friends asking about my current project, this is what the centre will look like:

For those friends who quilt, who are trying to figure out the block, here it is:

The basic block is beautiful, but I have to admit that I find the turquoise a little too much in the multiple blocks. I was hoping the brown would be dominant, and the turquoise would be more of a secondary colour. I think if I ever do this block again, I might do the two stars in two shades of the same colour.

Finally, I want to share with you the challenge it is to ignore food in Canada. I have never had trouble staying slim while living in the U.S. In Canada, it’s another story, and part of the reason is that they have better candy here, such as my favorite candy bar, Big Turk. Big Turk is rose-flavoured turkish delight coated with chocolate. I love both those things, and together they are a dream. Another favorite is wine gums (not made with wine). They are chewy candies in various flavours, and I love them with the fervour of an addict. I have to ration myself, and to paraphrase hockey great turned potato chip hawker Mark Messier, I cannot eat just one. It’s usually a whole roll.

Party Cake

For Father’s Day we did a whole lot of things– including my sister giving my dad blueberry bushes, and my mother nobly agreeing to give up space in the garden for them to grow. One of the things I did was make a cake. It was supposed to be a big chocolate layer cake, but due to those sometimes not-so-fun compromises that have to be made when you live with other people, the oven was not available, the wrong type of cocoa was in the pantry, and things went downhill from there. So the cake ended up being the “classic butter” cake out of Flo Braker’s cookbook, and I made the sour cream chocolate frosting from Trish Boyle’s “The Cake Book”. Jill, who is a pastry chef, has that book on her blog’s recommended list, and I bought the book last summer but had yet to make anything out of it, due to the pie project– so I made the sour cream chocolate frosting just to get my toes wet with the book.

The cake turned out well, even though I’m not really a fan of plain/yellow cakes paired with chocolate icing. The icing was a little difficult to work, as you can probably see. Fortunately I remembered the hot knife method and used that to even things out a bit. It was still messy, but then I remembered seeing a cake in James McNair’s cake cookbook that was covered in coloured candy buttons. I ran upstairs, got out a box of Smarties (that’s Canadian Smarties, for you Americans) from my bedside table (it was waiting to be mailed in a package to my nieces and nephew in Texas), and decorated the cake. I think this is such a happy-looking way to decorate a cake that I wanted to share it with you. If you aren’t a professional pastry chef, like Jill, or an amazingly professional amateur, like my friend Cathy, this is an easy idea for cake decoration. And who says that reading cookbooks isn’t extremely valuable? I have just proven twice over that reading cookbooks is educational and lifesaving.

As I cut into the cake later I remembered all over again how much I love that moment when you first cut into a layer cake. The way it looks and feels as the knife goes in, I just love it. It’s your first hint if you’ve done the cake right, how it starts to slice.

Salt Spring Island Farmer’s Market

This morning we took the ferry over to Salt Spring Island to visit the farmer’s market there, mostly to give my aunt a trip out on the ferry before she returns home to Wales in a few days. It was a beautiful day, with some clouds in the morning and then clearing to bright sunshine.

At the farmer’s market there are more cheap jewelery stands that you would believe possible, along with artisan bread and cheese makers, lavender growers, small vegetable farmers, potters, and painters. At one stand (above), we actually saw loaves of bread selling for up to $11.75 per loaf. And to answer your question, no, the loaves were not big. I think the guy justified his prices with the cute cart and the chef’s whites he wore while selling the bread.

I am wondering, though, why soap makers make soap that sounds like it should be eaten, as seen at this stand: mint julep, orange and cream, etc. What does that say about human senses? I could try and explain it by talking about starving teenage girls who won’t eat, using soap that smells like food in a feeble attempt to satiate appetite, but I think it’s too much of a stretch.

We came home after a disappointing “gourmet” hot dog and worked in the garden. We are planting a couple of elderberry bushes so that we can eventually make my Welsh grandmother’s elderflower champagne (really a cordial, since we don’t let it ferment and become alcoholic). The garden is full of birds. This past month we’ve attracted a pair of American goldfinches (we’re not sure if they escaped a cage somewhere or what), and three mourning doves. And our hanging baskets are bringing out the hummingbirds again. This year’s baskets include a type of nemesia called “blueberries and cream”:

Two more pies for the pie project

This weekend I made individual apple pies with the leftover filling from the apple turnovers, which I can never manage to take as much filling as they should. I froze these small pies uncooked for later baking, and we had them hot out of the oven (it’s been rainy, windy, and foggy here the past while). Please note the nice yellow top on this one:

I had mine with cream poured over. I baked them in these foil tins that are usually used for making meat pies. The tops and the bottoms cooked as they should, but the sides went soggy. Doesn’t that seem a little weird or unusual?

And yesterday I made another coconut cream pie from Emeril Lagasse’s “Best Ever” coconut cream pie. Just to remind you, you can get the recipe by going to Foodnetwork.com. It was as good as ever. I have discovered through making this pie and the banana cream pie that my dad loves American-style cream pies, which I would never have guessed.

Extremely fattening stuff, though. You might be thinking that I should have topped the pie with toasted coconut, and you’d be right, it should be topped like that, but I burnt the last of the shredded coconut in the house. So it’s a plain white top. I do want you to notice the flaked coconut distributed through the custard, though. You’d think that this would be an annoying texture, but you would be wrong, it somehow works. This is another pie you really ought to try, and it’s very easy. I do want to announce here as well that my mother complimented me on my pie crust, which was very very nice to hear, since I consider her the best hand with pie pastry I know.

Anyway, all this pie and turnover-making over the past week means that I now feel caught up on the once-a-week pie making, which is good. The only problem now is that I don’t have an audience receptive to experimentation, and I am feeling a little tugging need to do a wild and wonderful experiment pie. Like, for example, the chocolate cream/cherry/whipped cream/chocolate drizzle pie my nephew has suggested I need to make.