As a birthday gift I received a lovely canning book, "food in jars" by Marisa McClellan. Throughout the book she pairs small batch recipes with cute short stories. As soon as I saw the recipe for lemon curd I knew it would be the perfect Mother's Day gift.
I made two batches of the lemon curd on two subsequent nights. The ingredient list is short and simple - Meyer lemons, butter, sugar, and eggs. You have to cook the egg mixture over a double boiler and the first night I was pretty timid with the temperature. The last thing I wanted was a bowl full of lemony scrambled eggs. I cooked and stirred and cooked and stirred for almost an hour instead of the 6-9 minutes listed in the recipe. Finally my curd thickened and I could put it in the mason jars and then can as directed. The resulting lemon curd was a beautiful deep yellow color and it tasted delicious. The second night I was not so timid and I turned up the temperature on my double boiler. The curd thickened in about 10 minutes and while it was lighter in color it was still absolutely delicious. I love it when simple ingredients can come together to make something so wonderful.
To pair with the lemon curd I took some help from King Arthur flour and their scone mixes. One night I made lemon ginger scones and then fresh the morning of shipping, raspberry vanilla scones.
Not only was this project tasty but I got to use so many of my kitchen toys - all of my canning equipment, the mini-scone pan, the citrus zester and juicer and even the offset spatula.
Thanks to the post office for getting my packages to their final destinations in just two days with smeared address labels (darn rain shower Thursday morning).
Happy Mom's Day!
