Scrumptious Lemon Curd

What with all the eggs being produced now (okay, so Amy left a few dozen of her own delicious eggs here too), I thought I’d best get baking! I’ve been meaning to make up and jar some lemon curd in readiness for the little lemon meringue cheesecakes I plan to make for our baby shower/house-re-warming. Lemon curd is something I make all the time, mainly due to a glut of eggs and lemons, and also because it’s delicious. I am a lemon-anything-fan, the fact that the eggs and lemons are homegrown I’m sure makes it taste all the more scrumptious too.

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Scrumptious Lemon Curd

Ingredients
6 lemons
6 whole eggs
2 egg yolks
2 cups caster sugar
200g butter, chopped

Method
Grate the rind off a few lemons, I like my curd quite zingy so I use about 3 or 4 of the lemons, a lot of recipes only call for the rind of 1 lemon – pffft! Squeeze all the lemons, you should have roughly about 400ml of juice. Combine the rind and juice.

Whisk the eggs, plus the egg yolks, until just combined, then put through a fine sieve, into a glass bowl. Add the lemon rind, juice, sugar and butter and put bowl over a saucepan of gently simmering water. Stir the mixture, continuing to gently simmer, for about 20 minutes or until the mixture comes together to the consistancy you’d like (keep in mind it might set a bit firmer). You’ll think it’s taking forever and is too runny, don’t worry, it will come together. Patience, grasshopper.

Pour your scrumptious lemon curd into jars and let cool at room temperature.

See? Scrumptious. A traditional French-style curd is a lot runnier than you might be used to, so again if your curd doesn’t thicken to how you think it should, don’t panic, just call yourself oh-so-French-cookery-master. Oui oui! I have lemon curd on toast, on ice-cream, on my muesli (yes, really). I use it in baking, like for the cheesecakes, but also muffins or tarts. It’s a pantry staple in this house – eggs, lemons, butter, sugar – what’s not to love?!