Lemon Curd

When we were planning our menu for the tea, Sherry and I got this brilliant idea to use an eggless lemon curd. Cheaper, easier...what could be wrong with our plan? We'd researched a recipe that called for corn starch and...I don't remember what else. Except that eggs were not involved.

I made up a batch of the recipe. I know that you have to stir a long time to get the creamy consistency of lemon curd...but really!? After an interminable amount of time swishing my gloppy, disgusting mixture back and forth the result still looked like school room paste gone bad. You know what one of the functions of egg must be in a lemon curd recipe? Giving it that nice creamy yellow color that makes you anticipate the lemony goodness of your first bite, that's what! The eggless batch had a sickly off-white color, and stayed runny, except for the seemingly unmixable lump of sticky cornstarch at the bottom.

The internet tells me women have made this type of lemon curd and had amazing results worthy of touting to fellow cooks all over the wide world of webdom. I am clearly not one of those women. After a most frustrating session and tired arms from so much stirring, I headed to the store, bought lots of eggs and made version two of lemon curd.

YUMMMMMM. This new batch was everything I'd dreamed of in a lemon curd. Easy, nice to look at and very, very tasty. One of the reviewers online said something about the mild taste that was so good she used it to make lemon meringue pies. I didn't do that (yet) but in tasting the mellow and smooth lemon flavor, I could definitely see what a nice pie filling it would produce.

And one side note to clearly reveal how not too slick I can be in a kitchen. I've always zested lemons for the peel. No big deal but for all the "work", zesting seems to produce not as much product as I'd like. Or to put it simply - you run that zester back and forth over the lemon and only seem to get a measly amount of peel scraping off into your bowl. Looking at this recipe and noting that it said GRATED lemon peel, I decided to do just that - whip out my micro-grader and run that over the lemon. Whoa, talk about a big difference. For no effort at all, I had tons (relatively speaking, when you're discussing little shavings of lemon rind) of the peel to add to help color up my curd and keep it from looking like an unsavory glob.)

LEMON CURD

3 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice  (You can also use the bottled lemon juice. I know this because I was making this late the night before the tea and I ran out of the fresh lemons for my second batch so used the lemon juice. Both variations tasted great.)
1/4 cup butter or margarine, melted
1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
Directions

In the top of a double boiler, beat eggs and sugar. Stir in lemon juice, butter and lemon peel. Cook over simmering water for 15 minutes or until thickened. (I had to stir mine WAY longer than 15 minutes but I was doing two different batches of tripled recipe.)