Spoon half of the lemon filling over the top of the meringue on the cake plate. Spread it with a rubber spatula so it’s almost out to the edge.

Put the best-looking meringue on top. Spoon the rest of the lemon filling on top of that meringue and spread it out with a rubber spatula.

To serve, cut pie-shaped wedges at the table and transfer them to dessert plates. This is a light, sugary but tart, totally satisfying summer dessert.

Yield: Serves 4 to 6 people (unless you invite Carrie—she always has thirds.)

Another Note From Hannah: This dessert is certainly yummy, but it’s not gorgeous. When Sally serves it at the Lake Eden Inn, she slices it in the kitchen because the meringues tend to crumble. Then she puts it on a beautiful dessert plate or in a cut glass dessert bowl, tops it with a generous dollop of sweetened whipped cream, and places a paper-thin lemon slice on top to make it look fancy.

Chapter

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

“Why are you smiling like that?” Delores asked. Her mother’s question yanked Hannah out of the contented daydream she’d slipped into after finishing the baking and back to reality, where she was sitting across from Delores in the kitchen of The Cookie Jar. Since telling her mother that she’d been thinking about Ross, the fun they’d had the previous evening, and the possibility of more fun in the future might encourage her matchmaking matriarch much too much, Hannah pretended she hadn’t heard. “What did you say, Mother?”

“Why were you smiling like that?”

“Smiling like what?”

“Like the cat that got into the cream pot.”

Hannah’s ears perked up. It was another Regency expression from the mother who’d been spouting them left and right for the past few weeks. In less time than it took to mix up a batch of Oatmeal Raisin Crisps, Delores had used three Regency expressions and the cat and the cream pot counted as the fourth. She’d said high in the instep to describe someone who was snooty, she’d called the new sweater she’d bought all the crack to mean that it was fashionable, and she’d explained that one of her customers had suffered an attack of the megrims when she went into a severe depression over her daughter’s divorce. Hannah was used to hearing Regency expressions for a day or two after a meeting of the Lake Eden Regency Romance Club, but the meeting this month had been canceled so that the members could try out for parts in the movie.

“What’s with all this Regency-speak?” Hannah asked, answering a question with a question in an effort to throw off her mother’s game.

“It’s just so much more colorful, isn’t it?” Delores also answered a question with a question, and mother and daughter began to volley.