There’s a moment in chapter nine of Alexis Hall’s For Real where Toby is baking a lemon meringue pie in Laurie’s kitchen, and things get kinky.
Laurie, our slightly older sub, has clamps on his nipples. There’s an anal hook involved. And somehow, in the middle of all of that, Toby the Dom (not to be confused with Dom the Dom) is still thinking about curd consistency and whether his meringue is going to weep.
It’s one of the most talked-about scenes in Hall’s Spires series: a kink scene and a baking scene, running at exactly the same time, neither one interrupting the other. Grace, one of the side characters, later calls the pie “foodgasmic” when she gets her hands on a slice. Having now made the thing myself, I get the enthusiasm.
I don’t have a boyfriend. I definitely don’t have an AGA. I’ve always wanted an AGA, the wildly expensive British cooker (and I’m told wildly impractical), that lives in Laurie’s kitchen and that every home baker with a For Real hangover has since coveted. What I do have is a normal Sydney apartment oven, a bowl of lemons sitting on the table (thanks Dad), and an afternoon with nothing better to do than find out if a book’s most iconic dessert holds up outside the page.
Short answer: it does. Completely.
The pie itself is a classic lemon meringue with a shortcrust base, a proper lemon curd filling, and a meringue piled on top and torched until it’s freckled brown. What makes it Toby’s pie, rather than just a pie, is the one trick he lets slip mid-scene: don’t let the curd cool down before you top it with meringue.
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Most lemon meringue recipes tell you to let the filling set before you go anywhere near it with egg whites. Toby does the opposite. He keeps the curd warm, so when the meringue goes on, the heat cooks it gently from underneath as well as from the top. I followed his lead, and it worked exactly as advertised with no soggy, weeping gap between the curd and the meringue, just one pie that held together properly, layer to layer.
It was also, genuinely, delicious. Sweet where it needed to be, sharp where it needed to be, the kind of dessert that tastes more complicated than it is. Which is the other thing about this recipe: it’s simple. A handful of ingredients, no obscure techniques, nothing that sends you to a specialty grocer. Which might be the most romance-novel thing about the whole scene, the most iconic pie in queer romance fiction right now is one that anyone with an oven and a bowl of lemons can actually pull off.
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Like Laurie in that scene, I was “powerless and playful” making my way through it. Minus the hook and the clamps, obviously. Just me, a mixing bowl, and a fair amount of laughing at myself for how invested I’d gotten in the outcome of a fictional character’s dessert.
If you want the actual recipe with measurements, method, the lot, it’s included in full in the reprint of For Real, book three of Hall’s Spires series, alongside Waiting for the Flood and Glitterland. I’m not going to republish it here. Buy the book, support Alexis, and bake it properly.
This isn’t the first time one of Hall’s books has sent me down a rabbit hole, and it won’t be the last. Between this, the Spires series and his Material trilogy (waiting to make Odile’s special curry), I’ve got a running list of scenes I want to eat my way through.