Thursday, June 6, 2013

52 Weeks of Baking: Week 15 - Lemon Cream Pie

Don't get bored of lemon things. It's my outlet for baking 'spring' things on a day (MAY TWELFTH) when it's freezing and snowing / hailing. HAILING AND SNOWING I ask you. Unacceptable.

Anyway, it's Mother's Day (hope you called your mother) and we went to my aunt's for dinner as is family tradition. She usually orders Chinese. Nom nom. My mom made a chocolate cake in celebration of my uncle's birthday - chocolate is his favourite - but I offered to make something and my aunt said that would probably be appreciated. Why have one dessert when you can have two?!

I struggled for a bit with what to make. Cupcakes + chocolate cake seemed too redundant, even though cupcakes are always yummy, so I finally decided on a tart. My tart pan hasn't had enough use by far.

I was too lazy to make a regular crust so I went with a spice cookie crumb crust. Easiest crust ever. And Dare Simple Pleasures Spice Snaps are vegan. Perfect. I had already chosen to do lemon, based on the success of last week's lemon curd, but I wanted something a bit bulked up and decided to follow last week's theme even more closely and added some coconut. I came across this recipe which looks like a take on lemon meringue. The topping, however, is coconut with some agar cooked with the water from the coconut, and then the coconut cream is beaten in. I never got it to the solid state that it looks like it was in to top the lemon cream pie in the photo, because then I beat in a full recipe of lemon curd.

HOWEVER... it turns out that whatever happened the thing did not solidify properly and was kind of a creamy mess. I don't know if I should have added more agar or let the curd set better or maybe just cooked the agar more, but whatever happened it was like lemon custard. I mean, it was still delicious, but just don't go and do this unless you want lemon soup stuff.

Looks pretty at least!



















Up close