Angel Pie (First impressions)

We cut the Angel Pie (Old Florida style) this morning. Here’s our first impressions.

First and most importantly, it is OK to have pie for breakfast. We reasoned our way through this with little difficulty. I hope you agree.

Second, since Angel Pie has no pastry crust, it is extremely delicate. Baked meringue has some tensile strength, but not much. Cutting through it is not a problem. Lifting out a single piece of pie—especially the first one—was really tough. Moreover, any bumps to the baked meringue edging will produce crumbles or dents. This is definitely a “show pie” or a family-table pie. It would be hard to shovel this one in a shop when servers are working fast. (If anybody has other ideas, we’d love to hear them.)

Third, once we got it cut, the center layer of orange custard was still pretty unstable. Putting that atop a baked meringue and under whipped cream is like trying to stack pudding. No tolerance for jiggles here. Maybe if we used a stabilizer, like gelatin?

Fourth, all that having been said, this pie is absolutely delicious. The whipped cream had less powdered sugar in it than usual, but that was fine, given the sweetness of the baked meringue. The mandarin oranges within and on top were aromatic and tasty. And finally, that baked merangue has a candied flavor all its own. We couldn’t decide what it tasted like; but we decided it tasted really good.

Fifth, this pie is light as a feather. An angel feather. Hey! Maybe that’s why its called angel pie!