Lemon Meringue…One Last Time – Tartelette
Lemon Meringue…One Last Time
01.10.2006
Helene Dujardin
(Senior Editor)
17 Comments
I don’t know if you are like me but I seem to have two kinds of shopping trips. There is the “quickie”, as in quickly in and quickly out (depending who’s in front at the cash register) to get a couple of items I may have forgotten for dinner or something. The second kind, my favorite, is the one in which I have my baking plans carefully thought with a list of ingredients necessary and where I have and take the time to perouse the aisles checking out new products, picking up, touching, smelling fruits and vegetables, talking with the fish guy or my salad guy. He calls me “papillon” because like a butterfly I go from one bin to the next but can’t make up my mind on anything. It is during those longer shopping outings that I often get sucked into buying a case of fruits or other because it is a one day sale, and you probably figured by the title of today’s post that this is what happened when I found myself hauling a case of lemon out to my car.
I tried to do everything possible, lemon curd, preserves, cocktails, but irreversibly found myself drawn to the citrus recipes I found in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home To Yours.
I had a difficult time settling on one and I promised myself to try the others fairly soon,as they look and sound so tempting: Pierre Herme’s Lemon Cream tart, Fresh Orange Cream Tart, Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie, Florida Pie,….and the one chosen today: Tartest Lemon Tart.
I decided to make individual tarts and changed the ingredients only very slightly.
Here is the recipe, adapted from Dorie Greenspan.
2 lemons
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 egg
2 egg yolks (save the whites for the meringue)
1 1/2 Tb. cornstarch
Sweet Tart Dough or your prefered pate sablee.
For the dough: in a food processor, combine 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 cup powdered sugar and 1 stick of butter, pulse until it ressembles coarse meal, add 1 egg yolk and pulse until combined into a ball. I flattened it into a disk in between sheets of plastic wrap, refrigerated it and rolled it out to cut rounds big enough to fit into my mini tart pans. The dough gets soft very fast so you can flour your fingertips to push it up and down the sides and bottoms of the pans.You can also sub. 1/4 cup ground nuts for 1/4 cup of the flour for added flavor.
For the filling: juice the lemons and strain if necessary. Combine the egg, yolks, sugar and cornstarch, add lemon juice and pour into the tart shells. Bake at 350 for 15 – 20 minutes. Let cool completely.
For the meringue: whip the egg whites to a foam, slowly add the sugar to form a shiny meringue. Pipe on top of the baked and cooled tarts. Put under broiler for a couple of minutes or until lighlty browned.
Serve, and pucker be ready…these are tart!
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