Meringue Shell Recipe

I found myself with some left over egg whites and needed to find something to make to use them up. I have always made Pavlova, but wanted to try making individual meringue shells this time. I found the below recipe on the BBC website at this website - How to make meringues

The recipe says to use dessert spoons to scoop the meringue onto the tray. I wanted them to be more unified so I piped the mixture.

These were very straightforward to make and very similar to making pavlova. The key when making pavlova or meringue, is to whisk the egg whites on high speed until stiff, then slowly add in the sugar. It's important not to add the sugar in too quickly, you want each spoonful to dissolve before the next spoonful is added.

You could add fruit to these, or change the way you pipe the egg whites to make them into a nest like a mini pavlova. I definitely will make these again, especially if I'm having a dinner party and want to make individual portions.

Paul Hollywood's Lemon Meringue Pie

I asked Kay who I live with if she had any requests from Paul Hollywood's "How to Bake" recipe book. Instantly she said Lemon Meringue Pie. So this one was for you Kay.

This was my first attempt at a Lemon Meringue Pie and I found it a very easy to follow recipe. I did cheat again with the pastry and had ready to roll. But the pastry could have been made the day before and kept in the fridge.

This recipe uses a lot of fresh lemons to make the lemon curd, which you could reduce if you didn't want it to be as tangy. For me I think the lemon flavour could have been reduced slightly, but not too much, I didn't think it was extremely tangy. However, Kay who requested the pie loved the flavour as it was.

There was spare lemon curd which I put in to a tupperware tub and stored in the fridge. This could be used on toast, a rivita cracker with cream cheese, mixed with vanilla ice-cream for lemon curd ice-cream. Anything you want really.