When life gives you lemons …….

make lemon butter and lemon cordial of course!

My gorgeous cousin was married in Melbourne over the weekend I had a very quick trip down there to help her celebrate.  My aunty has a huge lemon tree in her backyard which was just brimming with fruit – so of course, as a favour, I offered to help her and bring some of those lemons back to Sydney.  Yes, my suitcase was actually half full with lemons – the advantage of a quick trip, I had hardly any clothes!

So day 2 of owning a thermomix and I had to use up these lemons – first up, lemon butter.

I used Tenina’s Citrus Curd recipe (although I only used lemons) – http://tenina.com/2010/10/citrus-curd/

First taste is pretty good – I’m looking forward to trying some with pancakes this weekend.  And maybe filling some small tart shells and putting a bit of meringue on top (I’ve got two left over egg whites from the curd which will use these up perfectly).

You can see I need to actually purchase some jars to start storing my jams/butters etc.  These were all I had available tonight!

Next up is lemon cordial.  I found recipes in the Everyday Cookbook (EDC for those in know ..)  for lemonade but it is for drinking fresh that day.  Stephanie Alexander has a fabulous recipe in her Cooks Companion book (if you don’t own this book you should – no excuses!) which keeps in the fridge for months, and when diluted with soda water makes the most fabulous and refreshing summer drink.  And it goes so well with vodka and soda!

So once again I thought I would give the thermomix conversion a try.  Stephanie’s (yes, we are on first name terms) recipe calls for 2kg of sugar and 1 litre of water.  After putting 1 kg of sugar into the thermomix, it became quite clear that doing the full recipe was going to end in overflow!  So I’ve halved it and it made about 1.5 litres of cordial.

Stephanie Alexander’s Lemon Cordial in the Thermomix

Ingredients:

• 1kg castor sugar;
• 500ml of water;
• 15g of citric acid;
• 15g of tartaric acid (don’t confuse with Cream of Tartar);
• juice of 3 large lemons;
• finely grated zest of 1 lemon.

Method:

Scrub your lemons well, place zest into the TMX bowl, put dial in closed lid position and turbo a couple of times until you have finely grated lemon zest.

Add castor sugar and water to the TMX bowl and cook for 7 mins / 90C / speed 2.  Make sure the sugar has dissolved.

Add the citric and tartaric acids and cook for 2 mins / 90C / speed 2. 

Stir in the lemon juice.

Decant into bottles and store in the fridge.