My baking mojo has come back after abandoning me for so long!
It all started with 24 lemon cupcakes at the weekend. Best Irish butter, organic, unwaxed lemons, free range eggs (let’s try for happy hens 🙂 ) … of course sugar and SR flour… little to commend them, I’m afraid but they do play nicely with the other ingredients.
Some go into the office with Mr Bee. There’s now a requirement for him to go in once a week after WFH during the Covid years. He takes 10 or so. Six go to my next-door-neighbour. She’s very popular, lots of friends and family visit so a few extra to share with her pals over a cup of coffee.
Mr Bee eats the rest over the week. Not me. Without being too sanctimonious, I rarely eat sugar or processed flour these days. I’ve lost 3 stones since last August by restricting refined carbs (not keto diet) making better, healthier food choices and intermittent fasting. After years of disordered eating, including anorexia and bulimia from my long-ago teens, I have peace. No starvation, craving or bingeing. I’ll shut up in case my halo slips and chokes me.
Lemon Curd. Simple, sweet and smooth as silk. Fresh, lemony loveliness! I savour the smell and the process even though I don’t indulge – with not a single pang of temptation! Here’s how to make it.
Ingredients
110g castor sugar
60g butter
5 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
Zest of 1 lemon
Juice of 3 lemons
Method
Place a bowl over a saucepan (or bain-marie if you actually have one) of simmering water on the hob. Ensure the base of the bowl is above the water and not immersed. You wouldn’t like your bottom sitting in broiling water, would you?
Dissolve the sugar and lemon juice then add the eggs and whisk and stir till perfectly blended then stir and whisk some more… on and off… but more on than off… for 15 minutes. The mixture will thicken up as the eggs cook and will produce the most glorious yellow sunshiny hue.
Take the bowl off the heat and stir in the butter till it’s blended and the mixture is silky smooth.
Pour the mixture through a sieve into a sterilised jar (to sterilise, wash the jar in hot soapy water, rinse and pop in oven at 160 for 15 mins).
I use a riddler to coax, push and pummel the lemon curd through the sieve. A riddler is a knobbly-ended implement that makes this little job … rewarding …. in some strange way. If you don’t have a riddler, a spoon will do the trick.
Finally, gaze at your jar of sunshine and just enjoy the moment.
Mr Bee will eat it with ice cream, on bread and, if there’s any left, I’ll be making another batch of lemon cupcakes and giving each one a squidge of lemon curd. Use an apple corer to bore out a well from the top of each cake; fill a piping bag with some curd, snip off a corner and pipe it into the cake well. Lemon cake wells…. ha ha.
Happy days to anyone who might be reading this and a warm Hello from me in (chilly today) Ireland.
Three Bees in My Bonnet 
Oooh yum yum, Elly! I greatly admire your restraint though – I can just smell the deliciousness of home-made lemon curd. I used to make it myself but no longer since going vegan. We eat whole-food plant-based and enoy stable, healthy weights, both of us. I don’t think I could make lemon curd and not eat it, though!! Well done you.
Sorry to hear of your disordered eating in the past, and so glad you now have peace over food. Such a horrible thing to go through – I have known several people who did.
Thank you for leaving such lovely comments on my blog. Like you, I get few visitors these days. A for that “post” – no hair flipping or flouncing off on my part, I can assure you – just disappointment, anguish and deep sadness. It was time to move on anyway and I now have more time to be creative and explore other avenues.
Thank you for all your kind words! I had a lovely birthday, but quiet, with no particularly special activities, although I did get a lot of satisfaction from completing my teabag page (glad you liked it!) and great enjoyment in the doing of it. My gelli plate is arriving today and I can’t wait to get stuck into that!!
Kitties – Like Gracie, Ruby lies in my arms and purrs and purrs, and gazes into my eyes, and dribbles all over my arm that gets soaking wet, then she shakes her head and I get a shower bath!! Definitely being showered with love! Lily won’t really give me the time of day but uses me as a warming platform. She reserves all her cuddles for my hubby.
You are right – my life has had its challenges, but I am still here, and still smiling, and above all, know Jesus as my Saviour! We all need to treasure each moment and I’m as guilty as anyone of wasting time lol! Often it’s lack of energy that prevents me, with my ME, so I suppose that’s a reasonable excuse! I’m on a real creative roll at the moment and value every moment I can steal away up in the studio, but Tesco deliveries have to be dealt with, and cooking and piles of ironing (my chores today!) and can’t be left or we’d be living in a slum. My hubby is great – he hoovers around for me but neither of us is very good about dusting but hey, life’s too short!
I’d better stop this before it turns into a book, and my tofu (in the oven) burns to a crisp and my tea gets cold! My gelli plate has just arrived! Yay!
Shoshi x
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Hello!!!
I came onto the blog to find a tutorial for something I want to do but have forgotten despite having written it – blogs are brilliant as aide memoires.
I’ll hop onto your site later and reply but… I never thought you flounced off… I meant the followers who flocked together… iykwim… ciao meow for now, chick! x
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