With only two minutes to spare, Mary Kay Lyle raced across the street with her lemon meringue pie in hand to the Home Economics Building at the 2008 Missouri State Fair in Sedalia. The pie had to be there at 9:30 a.m. to be qualified to enter Melanie Blunt’s First Lady Pie Contest.

Mrs. Lyle almost didn’t make it after realizing she was missing two key ingredients for the pie and had to wait for a store to open to buy them. Her efforts paid off, though, as her pie won first place.

“I was so surprised,” Mrs. Lyle says, “because pie baking is not what I do.”

Mrs. Lyle is a Realtor with Realty Executives in Savannah, Mo., and says she hasn’t made pies for many years. It was fellow members of the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association, an organization she and her husband belong to, that convinced her to enter.

“I think it won because of the meringue,” Mrs. Lyle says.

She used a technique that she learned from making divinity. The crust was her mother’s recipe that she “tweaked” a bit. And the filling was a combination of reworked recipes she tried out on her husband.

Although Mrs. Lyle says her husband is now sick of lemon pie, she is glad she did it.

“It’s been great fun,” she said.

Sylvia Anderson can be reached

at sylviaanderson@npgco.com.