Lemon Meringue Pie Bites

So it was my turn to work at the hospitality table at church this past weekend. I wanted to bake something special (of course), but  I also wanted it to be bite-sized.  Because not everyone likes to have sweets for breakfast. Weirdos.

Anyhoo, I decided to make mini lemon meringue pies.  Because. Pie.  And since I have a love/hate relationship with pie crust, I decided to cheat and use my sugar cookie dough as the crust.  (The boy said that if I had added a layer of cake it would have been the perfect dessert.)

After making the dough, I got out my mini muffin pan and my small Pampered Chef scoop and got to work rolling balls of dough.  My very favorite activity in the whole wide world! [Insert sarcasm font here]

After rolling the dough, I used the Pampered Chef mini tart-shaper to make the balls into shells. Confession: I have had the tart-shaper tool for about 14 years and this is the second time I've used it for its intended purpose. The first time I made pecan tassies.  They were divine, but they stuck to the pan so badly that I had to chip them out and only like, six of them could be salvaged, so I ate them all and never used the tool again.

I am happy to report that this time the tart shells were successful.

When they were done baking they popped right out of the pan.  But I didn't take a picture of that part.

Moving on.

I made lemon pie filling while the shells were baking. Then I piped the very hot filling into the baked shells with a piping bag, giving myself some pretty wicked burns in the process.  Turns out you can let the filling cool down some because these aren't real lemon meringue pies, and we don't have to worry about putting the meringue onto hot filling.

Next I whipped up some meringue and piped a blob onto each of the pies using an open star tip.  You can't tell, though.  A round tip would have worked just as well.

And into the oven for 10 minutes or so.

I thought they came out cute.

They were pretty good overall.  The cookie dough was a little poofy, so I didn't get as much filling as I would have liked; however, most of the people who ate them liked the cookie-to-filling ratio.  The rest of us wanted a little more filling.  Next time I'll just use a little less cookie dough in the shells.

Specifics:

I think I used about 1 recipe of cookie dough (I always make a double batch and I used about half) and got 72 tarts.  I baked the tarts at 350F for 16 or so minutes.  Just until slightly golden around the edges.  Once the meringue was on, I baked them in a 375F oven for 10 minutes.

I made one batch of pie filling and had about 3/4 of a cup left over.  I gave the leftovers to the boy to celebrate him getting his black belt in Taekwondo. He was quite pleased.

Here's photo of the boy giving Arnold what-for:

Well, that's all for now.

Enjoy!