A Zesty Birthday
happy birthday to you,
happy birthday, dear Kenny,
Yup, my stud muffin of a fiance turns 26 today! In honor of his birthday I made him his favorite dessert…dun dun dun…a lemon meringue pie!
I should mention that I made him a lemon meringue pie last year, but it ended up being more like lemon soup pie; we literally ate it with a spoon. Needless to say, I was worried about making it again this time around.
Since he works for the military and his birthday also lands on Veterans Day, he has today off. My original plan was to make the pie while he was at work and then it’d be ready when he got home. But having today off put a little kink in my plans, so I made the dessert yesterday instead.
Here’s where the story gets fun! My new friend (we met via a blog!) Lindsay, of And We’ll Just Laugh Along the Way, just moved out here last week, and seeing how I want new friends out here and was worried about making this pie, I called her up to see if she wanted to come over and help me make it.
Lindsay happily obliged and came right over. After chatting for awhile, getting lost on base, and getting some delicious grub for lunch, we headed back to my house and started work on the pie.
The last time I made this I never really got to the next step. I thought the filling would “set up” and settle when it was in the fridge, but instead we got soup. So this time, I looked up several recipes and found one that had positive and non-soupy reviews.
I went with the Alton Brown version (recipe here), because I know how much Kenny likes Alton Brown, so if something went terribly wrong I could just blame him. After I poured the filling in the crust I knew we had nothing to worry about and that we had a winner. It was stiff and gooey and perfectly zesty.
Next up was the meringue. Lindsay added a few fantastic drops of vanilla to the mix and let the Kitchen Aid work its magic. Before we knew it, we had some nice egg white peaks appearing before us.
The recipe calls for us to pop the pie in the oven for a few minutes, so in it went…

Seeing that boy light up because of a pie just made my day!
After dinner he cut up two slices and we enjoyed the little slices of tangy heaven.

Personally, I think that’s a sign of a job well done!
GREAT JOB JESS! Wow, it sure does look a lot better than the soup pie did!!!!
YAY! So glad he enjoyed it! It was so much fun to help you make it! Happy Birthday Kenny!
yum! Happy Birthday to him! 🙂 Thanks for serving our country!
That looks absolutely delicious!
Hope you had a fabulous birthday!! The pie looks amazing!
Leaving you something on my blog in the AM! 🙂
GORGEOUS!!!! It looks sooo yummy 🙂 And you're so right, there is no better compliment than the smile on his face!!! Very glad that he enjoyed it.