LEMON meringue pie!

Spoil your family this weekend and make this delicious traditional favourite.

There are a couple of different ways you can make lemon meringue pie: using a pastry base or a biscuit base, and filling with the traditional lemon curd, or the more modern condensed milk filling.

Most of my baking friends make their lemon meringue pies with a biscuit base and condensed milk filling, and as far as I can remember, this is the only way I have ever had it.

Until now, where I've decided to give a more tradtional, Mary-Berry-style pie a go.

Lemon meringue pie is a type of baked pie, usually served for dessert, baked with a crust usually made of shortcrust pastry, lemon custard filling and a fluffy meringue topping.

Lemon meringue pie is prepared with a bottom pie crust, with the meringue directly on top of the lemon filling then baked in the oven for a show-stopping look.

Lemon-flavoured custards, puddings and pies have been enjoyed since medieval times, but meringue was perfected in the 17th century.

Lemon meringue pie, as it is known today, is a 19th-century product. The earliest recorded recipe was attributed to Alexander Frehse, a Swiss baker from Romandie.

The lemon 'custard' in a lemon meringue pie is usually prepared with egg yolks, lemon zest and juice, sugar, and optionally, corn starch. This gives it a texture similar to that of a sturdy pudding.

The meringue, which includes well beaten egg whites and sugar, is cooked on top of the pie filling. As the meringue bakes, air bubbles trapped inside the protein of the egg whites will expand and swell.

However, if the egg whites are beaten too much, or if a tiny amount of fat is allowed to contaminate the mixture, then the proteins will not be able to form the correct molecular structure when cooked, and the meringue may collapse when cooked.

The meringue can be beaten into either soft or stiff peaks. The temperature the pie is baked at and the method by which sugar is added also determines the texture and durability of the meringue.

I was curious as ever as to finding some sort of health benefit in my baking. Besides large amounts of vitamin C, lemons also contain riboflavin, thiamin, iron, magnesium, pantothenic acid, fibre, vitamin B6, potassium, copper, calcium and folate.

Lemons contain more negatively charged ions than positive ions, which gives you a boost as the lemon enters your digestive tract. Just the scent alone of lemons can improve your mood and elevate your energy levels.

Lemons also promote clear thinking and help reduce anxiety and depression.

Back to the cake-pie. The topping should be crunchy above, fluffy and marshmallow-like below, which means a fairly brief cooking time. You could, if you wished, use a blowtorch.

It looks good, but in my opinion it lacks the crisp shell that cracks so satisfyingly beneath the spoon in the other pies.

If you have time, chill the pie before topping with the meringue, it will lessen the topping leaking syrup, caused by steam released from the hot filling dissolving the meringue before it's cooked.