Falling out of love with Delia.

Oh my. Oh my, oh my. After my recent discovery of Delia's Complete How To Cook, I tried to emulate my previous success and make a lemon meringue pie. Using, no less, my new pie dish. Which I love. HOWEVER. The lemon meringue pie was a bit fat fail of a pie. Granted, it does look ok and I really thought I'd done it. If only we could have just looked at it forever. 

 So the meringue could have been a little higher. The whisked egg whites were perfect right until I put the sugar in with them; I think maybe I used the wrong type and it was too heavy. It tasted yummy though. 

The pastry was a little blighter this time too. I just couldn't roll it out any wider, so I ended up stretching it a little to reach the rim of the dish. Bad idea. After about 5 minutes in the oven the pastry had slipped down the sides of the dish leaving little crusty bits along the top. YUM. 

And now we move onto the lemon filling. This is the first time I have ever used cornflour and I wasn't exactly au fait with what it does. The recipe tells you to boil the water with the lemon zest in it, add it to the cornflour and then transfer all of this back to the pan and bring to the boil while still stirring, so it doesn't stick. I didn't even get a chance to stop it sticking; it was like a big lump of lemony wallpaper paste before I could even think what was happening. But then I added the rest of the ingredients and all seemed to be well again. So I piled it all into the pastry case and popped it in the oven. 

As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So, Sunday evening, main courses polished off, out comes the pie. As soon as it got cut I could see something had gone drastically wrong. The meringue looked and tasted fine, but the filling was like cement?! I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be silky and melt in your mouth-y, whereas mine looked as set as it possibly could be and, put simply, lumpy. Which my dad will happily attest to; he had one bite and just couldn't go on. My grandma ate all of hers, but I think she was just being nice. So, the rest of the pie went in the bin.

After making the leek and goats cheese tart from this book, I mentioned that it was pretty difficult to follow in the heat of the moment, due to it being one huge chunk of prose. I'm not saying it's entirely the fault of the book, but that most definitely goes some way to explain why this went so wrong. I got all flappy and kept losing my place and splashing egg everywhere. Nightmare. So today I am making some Earl Grey cupcakes to remind myself I can bake a little bit well. 

Can anyone shed any light on what I might have done wrong?