Kirsteen Ure

The lemon cream pie in Chelsea Winter's new plant-based cookbook Tasty looks enticing, and so Erica and I band together one afternoon to make it. Tasty is a pretty book: packed with pictures, it also has a ribbon to mark your recipe. It’s billed as a collection of delicious, accessible, meat-free, egg-free and dairy-free recipes, all with gluten-free options. 

‘Lisbon lemons are smug,’ says Erica, justifying the decision we've made to use Meyers. They’re not the best for zest, but there’s a big bowl here from a late fruiting tree so we’re using them. Do-the-job lemons for do-the-job cooks. Cooking can be relentless when you’re catering for kids; and dietary requirements (low red meat and no gluten at my house) and everybody’s preferences rule our kitchens. 

I have many of the ingredients in my pantry. But a detail we miss is that while prep is 40 mins, setting time is six hours. We discover this when we’re in the kitchen, mixing bowls out, sleeves up and ingredients at the ready. Oversight number one. 

The pie base uses a combination of almond, buckwheat and rice flours, coconut oil, psyllium husk and coconut sugar. The filling swaps out the usual egg, milk and butter for coconut cream, plant based butter, and plant milk. Oversight number two: I’ve forgotten about milk. We cheat and use cow’s milk. 

The first step is to make the base, adding dry ingredients, melting and cooling coconut oil and mixing everything together. The recipe is silent on whether the spring-form cake tin we’re using should be lined and we decide no one ever wrecked a cake using baking paper. 

Erica has a super-duper, magic, baking paper trick: just add water. Wet a sheet of baking paper and hey presto, it shapes far more easily to the tin. I am impressed. I vow to tell my mum.

The recipe, overall, is simple (no blind baking or complexities with the filling). A small hiccup occurs when we need to distribute the base mix over the tin. The recipe says to use 2/3 on the sides but, for the tin we’re using, it seems to work best to reverse this and use 2/3 on the bottom. 

Onto the filling: mix everything together and pop it on the stove to heat, stirring. ‘Thai green curry,’ Erica says, tasting it. The lemon juice (oversight number three), sits forgotten on the bench. In it goes and the mix tastes infinitely more like lemon tart.

Whew.

Into the fridge it goes for six hours. Later, I send Erica pictures of the rest of the process including the cooling mixture in the bowl.

‘Has it curdled?’ she asks.

‘Nope, it’s the lumpy Meyer zest!’ 

I leave it overnight and serve it in the morning. Thumbs up from the husband; thumbs down from the kid. I’m with the husband. The base is biscuity and the filling light and summery.  I remember my daughter isn’t a huge fan of either almond or coconut. Oversights four and five.

Final verdict: the recipe worked pretty much perfectly – a great option if you’re looking for a fresh-tasting treat to impress someone who is gluten free or dairy free (remember plant-based milk) who is not my kid.