These little gems taste just like a slice of Lemon Meringue Pie! I think they also look like little meringue pies... they turned out so cute!
I have seen other pie cookies on the Internet but did not see any that said they were a meringue pie cookie. One of my favorite pies is Lemon Meringue Pie so that was an easy choice for me to decide to make. Another thing that made it easy to decide is that I had a sleeve of lemon pie filling that I had purchased a few weeks back from an Amish Store. It is pie filling but in a plastic sleeve rather than a can. It made it easy to fill the cookies because it was like I had my filling in a pastry bag.
In the above picture you can see some that are filled with the lemon pie filling, some that have the meringue on top and others with meringue on top that have been browned with my kitchen torch.
This was a really easy cookie to make. The crust/cookie is a shortbread cookie with only 5 ingredients. You roll the cookies in a 2 inch ball and put an indent in the center of each cookie for the filing. I used a 1/2 tablespoon measuring spoon for mine. Next time I will make the indent in the center bigger so that I can get more filling in. The ones I made seem to have a lot more meringue than filling.
Lemon Meringue Pie Cookies
crust:
1 cup butter
1 cup margarine
4 cups flour
1 1/2 cups powder sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
lemon filling:
1 can lemon pie filling
meringue:
3 egg whites
1/4 cup white sugar
Preheat oven to 325 degrees
Mix with a mixer the butter and margarine until it is light and fluffy. Add in the rest of the ingredients and mix until soft dough forms.
roll dough into 2 inch balls and place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Place an indent in the cookie either with your thumb or a measuring spoon.
Fill the indent with lemon pie filling.
Bake for 12 to 15 minutes. Cookies will be soft when taken out of the oven. Let them cool on the cookie sheets until they can be moved easily to cooling racks.
For the meringue:
Beat egg whites until stiff, slowly sprinkle in the sugar and continue to beat until stiff peaks form. Spoon the meringue over top of the lemon filing and seal around the edges of the pie filling. To brown the meringue I used a kitchen torch and lightly browned the top of my meringues.