Gluten Free Key Lime Pie Recipe

I made a key lime pie for the first time ever today, and although it was just for fun and not a “Blog” project, it turned out so fantastic that I had to share. To make this, I cobbled together three different recipes, and I was so happy with the result. The consistency was perfect, it looked pretty, got great reviews, is simple to make and is gluten free to boot, so I thought I should post how I did it – because goodness knows that experiments don’t always work out that way…

So here’s what I did:

Gluten Free Key Lime Pie

For the crust, I made this gluten free cereal crust recipe from Recreating Happiness using Cinnamon Chex cereal. I used my Ninja blender to crush the cereal and that worked great. Then I made the key lime filling using this recipe from Two Peas & Their Pod. A note on the filling: I squeezed out 5 key limes for the juice, but it didn’t make anywhere near 1/2 cup of juice as called for in the recipe, so I just squeezed out the rest of the limes I had in the bag – I didn’t count how many, but maybe around 10-12. I still didn’t have anywhere close to 1/2 cup – maybe 1/4 cup – but that amount worked just fine and gave the pie a wonderful flavor. For the zest, I used the zest from 5 key limes rather than one large lime, since that’s what I had.

I used the four egg whites that were left over from making the filling to make meringue using this standard meringue recipe from The Spruce Eats’ lemon meringue pie recipe.

For the baking time, I pre-baked the crust as directed, and then made the filling and meringue. I was debating when to add the meringue; a lot of recipes I’ve seen advise that meringue will only work well if you bake the pie filling first, but since the filling only required 15 minutes of baking time, and the meringue recipe also only required 15 minutes, I thought it would burn if I cooked it that long and so I opted to cook them both at the same time. This worked perfectly – in fact, about 10 minutes in I saw that the meringue was starting to burn slightly, so I moved it down to a lower rack for the remaining four and a half minutes or so, which stopped the meringue from getting too burnt and allowed the filling to cook fully. I then followed the filling recipe’s directions and put the pie into the fridge for one hour after allowing it to cool.

A note on the meringue quantity: Since I only did dollops of meringue as a stylistic choice, I ended up with way more meringue than I needed; so if you’re not planning on covering the whole pie, you could probably just use half the egg whites and use the other half for a healthy omelette or something to balance out all the pie. 😉 I ended up putting my leftover meringue on foil and baking with the pie to make individual meringues to eat, which was OK, but since it’s just egg whites and sugar it’s probably not as tasty as making meringues like these.