Lemon curd is a British spread with a lovely tart and lemony flavour. In my own variant I use both lime and lemon, which makes a perfect combination. The curd can be used on toasts and muffins or as filling in cakes and desserts. It’s very simple to make lemon curd and I strongly recommend doing it yourself instead of buying a jar in the store, which is filled with preservatives and other nasty ingredients. If you use fresh eggs and butter and sterilize the jar, the curd will keep in the refrigerator for up to 3 weeks.

Lemon and Lime curd
(makes about 450 ml – one big jar)

75 gram butter
2 eggs
finely grated zest from 1 lime and 1 lemon
fresh juice from 2 lemons and 1 lime
200 gram caster sugar

Beat the butter and sugar with an electric beater. Add the eggs, one at a time while beating. Add the zest and juice. At this point the mixture will look like it’s curdled but don’t worry as it will smooth out when the butter melts.
Simmer the mixture on low heat, stirring constantly to prevent it from curdling. Make sure to use a wooden spoon, otherwise your mixture can become discoloured. After 15 minutes your curd will be rather thick and now it’s time to pour it into a hot sterilized jar. The curd will thicken more when it cools. Keep in the refrigerator for up to 3 weeks.

Note: There are several recipes/methods on how to cook lemon curd. When cooking lemon curd with egg whites you sometimes can get lumps of curdled egg as egg whites cook at a rather low temperature. For some reason if you beat the butter, sugar and eggs as written above you avoid this problem.

This is a story about a pretty green pear and a lovely red apple that fell in love a pan. With some sugar, cinnamon and lime they ended up as a delicious Apple and Pear jam… Mmm…

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Apple and Pear jam
1 small jar

1 apple and 1 pear (a total of 200 gr rinsed and peeled fruit)
200 gr jam sugar (contains sugar, lemon acid, apple pectin and Sodium benzoate)
3 tsp lime juice
1 tbsp brown sugar
0.5 tsp cinnamon
100 ml water

Start with putting a small plate in the freezer. Rinse, peel and chop the fruit. Put the fruit, water and sugar in a pan and boil rapidly. Boil until the setting point is reached, about 15 minutes. To see if the jam is ready, take out the plate from the freezer and put a spoonful of jam on it. If the jam doesn’t set just continue with the cooking. Pour the jam into a clean jar when ready.

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I havn’t participated in any food blog event for a while so I thought I would take part in this month’s Sugar High Friday #8 with the theme “Pucker up with citrus!” hosted by Alice at My Adventures at the Breadbox. Fredrik has the digital camera as he’s attending the E3 expo and conference in Los Angeles this week so therefore the photo was taken with my cellphone (= bad quality).

My original plan was to make a pie or at least to bake something for SHF#8, but lately I’ve felt an urge for making my own jam and it seems like every food blogger is making jam. So I decided to go for a citrus marmalade. I don’t really know what to say about the result because actually I’m not especially fond of citrus marmalade in the first place as I prefer strawberries and other fruits. I like the taste of the marmalade alot but the lime peels are a bit too hard and I don’t know why (but I do hope that they will soften up a bit) . The orange peels are soft and nice, so maybe the limes requires longer cooking. Does anyone have any ideas? My brother that got a jar of the marmalade when he was here this week said that it’s delicious (apart from the hard lime…) and that he could eat it just as it is.

The morning after I had made my marmalade I saw “Obachans” pretty orange jam and I realized that I didn’t can my jars. She cooked her filled jam jars and I’m wondering how important that is? Before I made my jam I looked at Swedish recipes and there was nothing written about it there, besides from cleaning and pouring cooking water into the jars before filling them with the jam.

Anyway, here’s the recipe. Makes two small jars.

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Lime and Orange Marmalade with Grand Marnier

2 limes and1 orange (a total of 400 gr of citrus)
400 gr jam sugar (contains sugar, lemon acid, apple pectin and Sodium benzoate )
150 ml water
50 ml Grand Marnier (which is a orange flavored cognac based liqueur)

Start with putting a small plate in the freezer. Scrub the citrus fruits and then slice and cut them thinly. Put the fruit, water and sugar in a pan and boil rapidly. Boil until the setting point is reached, about 15 minutes. To see if the marmalade is ready, take out the plate from the freezer and put a spoonful of marmalade on it. If the marmalade doesn’t set just continue with the cooking. Pour the marmalade into clean jars when ready.

Serve with ice cream, on bread or just eat it as it is :-)

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