Lemon Meringue tart
This Lemon Meringue Tart is savoury and sweet. Buttery crust filled with creamy lemon filling and topped with sweet meringue.
The most important ingredients for the Lemon meringue Tart are high quality lemons. If you want your lemon tart to have that light, refreshing and zesty lemony taste our advice is to put some effort into finding good quality organic lemons. You can find some advice on how to find good quality lemons here.
The base of lemon meringue tart is sugar pastry. You can bake it yourself or if you want to make this recipe or you can also buy it.
Our detailed step-by-step instructions will help you to master this recipe.
Advice – in regards of pastry
prepare it one day (or night) ahead so it’s easy to manipulate and it will save you some time on the day when you are baking.
if you make a hole in the pastry (while rolling it or transferring it into baking tray) you can use leftover of dough to cover it.
You can also use leftovers for cutting out little cookies for decorating of Lemon Meringue tart
Ingredients for the pastry
200g all-purpose flour
100g butter soft and cut in pieces
80g icing sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
1 egg – room temperature
Ingredients for lemon filling
6 good quality lemons + lemon zest
6 eggs
250g icing sugar
60g butter
Ingredients for meringue
3 egg whites
300g icing sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Directions
1. In a bowl combine butter (soft, cut in pieces) with icing sugar using wooden spatula.
2. Add egg and vanilla essence.
3. Add flour and salt.
4. Transfer the mixture onto kitchen counter and gather it into a ball with your hands. Knead the pastry until ingredients are combined. Make a ball. If your dough seems to be too crumbly you can add 1 teaspoon of water.
Wrap the dough into kitchen foil and let it rest in the fridge for at least an hour.
5. Take the dough out of the fridge on the floured kitchen counter. Roll the pastry into a 30 cm circle. If you want to prevent the pastry from sticking to the counter and to ensure uniform thickness, keep lifting up and turning the pastry as you roll (always roll from the centre of the pastry outwards).
6. Loosely roll the pastry around your rolling pin and transfer to a (23 cm) pie tin. Gently fold the pastry into pastry tin.
7. Press the pastry into the flutes of the tin.
8. Trim the pastry to the edge of the pie pan. With the remaining pastry you can make decorative cut-outs.
9. Lightly prick the base with a fork.
If you have baking beans - cut out a piece of baking paper and put on the pastry. Fill with baking beans. Bake blind on 170 degrees for 15 mins.
10. Make decorative cookies. Put pieces of dough together and rolls out. Cut out your favourite shapes. Depending on the size, bake 5-7 mins.
Lemon filling
11. In a pan combine icing sugar, lemon juice (from all 6 lemons) and lemon zest.
12. Add 6 eggs. Whisk together with a wire whisk. Cook on low heat and stir all the time.
WARNING - cooking on low heat is very important otherwise you will make an omellete.
13. Once the mixture is nice and thick (no need to overcook it), add 60g of butter cut in pieces. Stir constantly until butter is melted and all ingredients are combined.
14. Pour the filling mixture into the cooled baked pastry case. Spread evenly. Bake on 130 degrees for 15 mins.
Meringue
15. With a handheld mixer or a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, beat the egg whites and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice on high speed for 4 minutes.
Add 300g icing sugar continue beating on high speed until glossy stiff peaks form, for about 5-8 minutes.
16. Use a piping bag fitted with a star tip to pipe the meringue over the top of the lemon curd.
17. Use a butane kitchen torch to brown the meringue. Alternatively, you can turn the dessert back into the oven and bake for couple of minutes on 230 degrees.
