Making Lemon Curd
Lemon curd has many uses and is very tasty when spread on bread or hot crumpets with butter but I wanted to make it to go in my Delicious Lemon Pudding recipe. It can also be used for many other dessert recipes and it is a really easy thing to make – particularly if you make it in a microwave. Added to that things always taste so much better when they are home made.
Lemon curd is also a great thing to make if you have a lemon tree and you are looking for things to make with lemons! Make it for friends and family or for sale at craft fairs or even at yard sales or car boot sales as a bit of extra income.
I think the main danger in making lemon curd in a microwave is that the curd would all go lumpy as I wouldn’t be able to stir it as I was heating it but it ended up coming out even better than when I usually make lemon curd on the hob!
Ingredients for Lemon Curd
So lemon curd is really very easy to make and does not take a lot of lemons as you might think. In fact you may already have all the ingredients at home anyway.
I just wanted to make enough for a small version of my lemon pudding so I used the following ingredients, but you can always double up if you want to make more lemon curd:
- 2 eggs
- 2 lemons
- 6oz caster sugar
- 4oz butter
Lemon Curd – Method
Firstly clean off the lemons so you don’t have a waxy surface on them, scrub the outsides if you need to. Then grate the lemon rinds into a bowl taking care not to get too much pith as this is quite bitter. Add to this the juice of both of the lemons.
Crack the 2 eggs into a separate bowl to ensure you don’t get any shell into the mixture. Give them a brief whisk with a fork and add them to the lemon rind and juice.
Add the rest of the ingredients into the bowl, cutting the butter into pieces.
Mix all the ingredients together as well as you can and then put them in the microwave on full power for a minute. This should melt the butter and allow you to blend the lemon curd mixture a bit better. Put the mixture back into the microwave for 1 minute intervals, stirring after each minute. After 2 minutes reduce the intervals to 30 seconds and stir each time.
The actual length of time will depend on how much mixture you have and the power of your microwave, but it should not take long after this for the mixture to start thickening up. As soon as you see some thickening at the bottom of the bowl, take the mixture out and stir it thoroughly. The rest of the mixture should thicken up at this point. Once you have stirred it all in, put it back in for 20 seconds to ensure it is all thickened up and then stir again and leave to cool.
Often when making lemon curd in the traditional manner it will curdle and you will get lumpy bits of egg in it but by cooking it in short bursts in the microwave you do not get the lumps, just a smooth and yummy lemon curd.
