Sometimes I find lemon curds to be either too eggy or really rich. This lemon curd only uses 3 whole eggs and no butter (hence the “light” part of the recipe). The lemon flavor is bright and tart. The only drawback to this recipe is that the curd doesn’t set up enough to use as a filling in a cake. But it’s perfect over ice cream or strawberries and as a filling for lemon tarts. Heck, it’s perfect straight out of the bowl, on its own.

Recipe after the jump.

Light Lemon Curd
Adapted from Alice Medrich’s Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts
Makes about 1 1/2 cups

9 oz (1 cup) fresh lemon juice, strained
5 tsp lemon zest
7 oz (1 cup) sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract

Combine sugar, lemon juice and lemon zest in a sauce pan over medium heat. Stir until sugar is dissolved, and mixture is starting to steam.

Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, lightly beat the eggs. When lemon syrup is ready, slowly stream the hot syrup into the eggs, whisking constantly. Continue to whisk for 2 minutes.

Pour mixture back into the sauce pan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, just until it boils. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla extract. Strain mixture into another bowl to remove zest and any bits of cooked eggs. Press plastic wrap onto the surface of the curd and refrigerate.

Currently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

I have to confess, I’ve never made biscotti. I don’t like crunchy cookies, and I abhor soggy things, so a crunchy cookie that you dip in coffee . . . well, ugh. But I needed one more recipe out of Baked, and I wanted something that was simple to make and wouldn’t require a trip to the grocery store. I had everything needed for these biscotti, so biscotti it was.

Another confession. I really liked these. Yes, they are very crunchy, and no, I didn’t dunk them in anything (ugh). Even Bryan, who doesn’t normally like hazelnuts, really liked these. It might have had something to do with the chocolate chips.

The cinnamon flavor is very pronounced, with the hazelnuts and chocolate chips adding their own background notes. I liked biting into the biscotti and getting different combinations of flavors each time.

The dough for these cookies is really simple. Eggs are beaten with sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon until thick. Then vanilla, flour, toasted hazelnuts and chocolate chips are added. The dough is spread out on a baking sheet and baked until firm, but not brown. Once the initial baking is done, the cookie log is cooled slightly and then sliced into the familiar biscotti shape. The cookies are then baked again until dry and toasty.

This is the last recipe out of Baked. My overall impression of the book is favorable. I didn’t run into any real flops, although a couple of the cakes worked better after I tweaked the ingredients (leavenings, mostly). I’m still thinking about the lemon drop cake and what a wonderfully bright flavor it had. That peanut butter pie was one of the quickest and easiest desserts I’ve made in quite a while, but looks (and tastes) fit for company. I think this book has definitely earned a spot on my bookshelf.

Up next, I’m going to get close and personal with my slow cooker.

For me, lemon cakes are either great or gross. There doesn’t seem to be much in between. Fortunately, this cake lands firmly on the great side. In fact, this might just be my favorite recipe out of Baked.

The cake part of this creation is a white cake flavored with lemon zest. I cut the recipe by 1/3 (because I only have two cake pans and the original recipe calls for three 8-inch pans) and toned down the leavening. I had no problems with the cake rising and then falling or being underbaked. My only concern was the tunneling that occurred in the cake (if you look closely at the slice of cake, you can see the holes in the cake). I might have over beaten the batter, but even then, the cake was light and moist with a really nice lemon flavor.

As the cakes were baking and cooling, I made the lemon curd part of the recipe. This is a standard lemon curd, lots of egg yolks, lemon juice and butter. Some lemon curds can taste really eggy, but not this one. It was the perfect balance between tart and sweet.

The last component of the cake was the frosting. Instead of calling for a standard buttercream, you cook a mixture of flour, sugar, milk and cream on the stovetop until it boils and thickens. This mixture is then whipped until cool at which point alot of butter is added. After more whipping, you end up with a light, satiny smooth buttercream. To make it lemony, some of the curd is stirred into the frosting. I’ve never made frosting like this, but I liked it. Alot.

To assemble the cake, you spread lemon curd between the cake layers and then frost the whole shebang. I had some concerns that the weight of the cake layers would force the curd out from the cake, but the curd was thick enough to stay put.

I’m already planning on making this cake again soon. I only ate a couple of pieces before I sent the rest to Bryan’s office. Now I’m thinking that was a mistake; I should have eaten the whole thing myself.

Currently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

I was feeling pretty lazy on the day I made these, so instead of making the tart part of this recipe, I stopped after the butterscotch pudding part. And I don’t think I missed much (except maybe lots of extra work and dishes).

I don’t eat much butterscotch stuff, but every time I do, I’m reminded of how much I like it. This pudding is no exception. It combines a dark caramel sauce with a pudding made of brown sugar, egg yolks, vanilla and milk. The end result is a thick, extremely rich pudding full of caramelly, buttery, brown sugary flavor.

My only problem with the recipe was that I ended up having to strain the pudding to get rid of lumps.

Every time I consider making something with peanut butter in it, I think of my step-daughter who loves the stuff. And you really can’t get much simpler than this no-bake frozen concoction. In fact, you could leave off the crust and just eat the filling as a frozen mousse.

So Cho, this one is for you.

You start off by making an easy chocolate cookie crust held together by a bit of butter. This crumb mixture gets pressed into a pie pan and left to solidify in the fridge while you make the filling.

The filling is simply cream cheese, smooth peanut butter, vanilla, brown sugar and cream. The cream cheese, peanut butter and sugar are mixed together until smooth. Then you whip the cream to soft peaks and fold it into the peanut butter mixture. Then the whole thing is dumped into the crust and frozen.

There are a couple of things I’d recommend changing. First, the authors have you put a layer of melted chocolate between the crust and the filling. The only purpose I found for this chocolate layer was to make it impossible to get the pie slices out of the pan. It didn’t add anything to the flavor, so I’d just leave it out. And the second change I’d make was to use either a springform pan or a square pan lined with tinfoil instead of a pie pan. The first couple of slices came out of the pan sans bottom crust. That crust was too hard to cut through. By pulling the pie out of the pan, you’ll get a better angle with the knife and can get a spatula or something underneath that bottom crust much easier.

The recipe also calls for an easy hot fudge sauce. The sauce was good and it went really nicely with the peanut butter filling.

Currently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

You might have heard of these bars under a different titles, such as Seven Layer Bars or Magic Bars. The big thing about this type of bar is that it is made up of seven different layers.

1. A graham cracker crust
2.  Nuts
3. Chocolate chips
4. White chocolate chips
5. Butterscotch chips
6. Sweetened condensed milk
7. Toasted, shredded coconut.

The only change the boys at Baked made was to use the coconut in the crust, along with the graham crackers. This makes for a mighty tasty, albeit crumbly, crust. These are some of the sweetest things to have come out of my kitchen in a very long time, and to even try to eat them without a glass of milk is pure folly.

The crust is a standard graham cracker crust (with toasted coconut added) held together with butter. The buttery crumb mixture is pressed into a pan, refrigerated briefly and then baked until toasty. I liked this crust, but I thought it had too much butter in it. Next time, I’ll reduce the butter slightly.

Once the crust is cooled, it’s topped with a layer of walnuts (sliced almonds, in my case), semisweet chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and butterscotch chips. And if that isn’t enough sweetness, two cans of sweetened, condensed milk are poured over the entire thing. This sugar bomb gets baked until the condensed milk is brown and bubbling.

We could only eat these bars in small, small squares, but they were pretty good. Besides reducing the butter in the crust, if I make these again, I’ll increase the amount of semisweet chocolate and reduce the white chocolate chips and the butterscotch chips.

The recipe comes from a new book by Christie Matheson called Salty Sweets. I got the recipe here.  The first time I made these cupcakes, it was for a family dinner on Christmas Eve. They were easy enough to make, but I thought they could benefit from a few modifications.

First, I scaled down the amount of baking soda from 1 teaspoon to 1/2 teaspoon. I also added 1 teaspoon of instant espresso powder to the batter. Second, and mostly importantly, I doubled the amount of butterscotch icing.

But that icing? Oh. My.

See, you really only need one batch of the icing to cover the cupcakes (unless you like a really thick layer of frosting), but you really should try this stuff drizzled over ice cream or straight from the fridge by the spoonful.

The icing is the only part of the recipe that gave me any trouble. You combine brown sugar, heavy cream, butter, water and coarse salt and cook it, on the stovetop, until it thickens. The first time I made the icing, I let it cook for the 15 minutes that the recipe calls for. Well, it never thickened enough that I could frost the cupcakes with it. I ended up beating the icing with a hand mixer to thicken it.

The second time I made the icing, I let it cook for almost 40 minutes. This time it thickened enough to stay put on the cupcakes, but it was pretty thin. In the end, I think I prefer the beaten version of the icing. It makes for a really nice mouth feel, you can mound it up like frosting, and it just looks better.

Almost exactly a year ago, I was wandering around the Borough Market in London. It was my first trip to London, and I was having a fantastic time. The market was full of people and food, and I probably looked like a dolt as I snapped picture after picture. One of the stands I wandered by was selling dulce de leche and giving out free samples.

Now, I’ve had dulce de leche, and it was good. But this stuff was amazing! It was tangy and creamy, with none of that overwhelming sweetness you sometimes find in dulce de leches. I bought a bottle, brought it home and shared it with Bryan. Then I pretty much forgot about dulce de leche until now, when I ran across this recipe here.

With tastebuds tingling at the memory of the dulce de leche from London, I set out to make my own. This really couldn’t be easier. You submerge a can of sweetened condensed milk in boiling water and simmer it for three hours. That’s it. The only hard part is remembering to add water to keep the can submerged. At the end of three hours, well, four hours since you want to let the can cool down, you are rewarded with dulce de leche.

Was it as good as the stuff I got in London? Not quite. That dulce de leche had a tang to it that mine didn’t. Maybe it was made from scratch, or maybe they used goat’s milk. But no matter. This was mine, and it was perfectly lovely spread over the first apples of the season.

Right from the start, me and this tart didn’t get along. It all started when I went to the market to get some plums. You see, the original recipe calls for plums, not nectarines, and for several days running, the market had piles and piles of beautiful plums. Except for the day I went to buy some. On that day, not a plum in sight. But they did have nectarines . . .

Next up was the crust. Mackie calls it a sweet almond dough that is pressed into the pan, rather than rolled out. The dough is made by combining ground almonds, sugar, flour and melted butter. The mixture is crumbled into a tart pan and pressed into place. Sounds easy. Should be easy. It wasn’t. The dough started hardening up right away and made it hard to cover the pan evenly. Eventually, after a lot of swearing and pressing, I got a fairly even crust. That went into the oven to blind bake until golden brown.

After 25 minutes of baking, my crust, when I peeked underneath the beans, was still white and wet. Out came the beans. In about 10 more minutes of baking, I had a browned crust. While the crust cooled, I started on the filling.

Cream cheese, eggs, sugar, lemon zest, cornstarch and nutmeg (basically a cheesecake batter) are mixed and spread onto the crust. Then the fruit is laid on top of the filling and the whole thing is covered with a crumb topping (flour, sugar, cinnamon and chilled butter mixed until crumbly). Again, sounds fairly simple.

My filling was very liquidy and it poured into the crust. And my lovely, beautiful nectarines had no flavor. None. Zip. At this point, I was going to finish this recipe come hell or high water. So, on went the sliced nectarines where they promptly sank into the filling. Adding the crumb topping only submerged them further, but at this point, I didn’t care. I popped the whole thing in the oven and started scraping bits of crust dough off my kitchen floor.

The tart baked for just over an hour and the thing actually had the gall to look and smell really lovely. I let the tart cool for a couple of hours and then cut a slice. Really, I didn’t have any hope that it would taste good (those nectarines . . .). I took a bite. Not bad. I took another bite. It was actually pretty good. Another bite. This is delicious. Something happened while that tart baked. The nectarines got some flavor, the filling firmed up and the crust and crumb topping gave the tart some texture and bite.

In the headnotes to the recipe, Mackie says this is an “easy-to-prepare” tart. Don’t believe it. It has multiple steps and components, not including cooling times. But the end result is completely worth the time and trouble. I was prepared to hate the tart, after all the work and trouble it caused me, but the result was worth it.

Here’s the story of the dessert that almost wasn’t . . .

Once upon a time, I offered to provide dinner (with dessert, of course) to Bryan’s niece who just had a baby. Along with a huge pan of lasagna, I planned on wowing her with Finamore’s Chocolate Whipped Cream Cake filled with whipped cream and raspberries. It is elegant, but simple (and very pretty, judging by the picture in Tasty).

As I was reading through the ingredient list, something caught my eye. The recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of baking soda. Now, according to author Shirley O. Corriher (in her most recent book, Bakewise, she talks about how baking soda/baking powder works and the proper proportions one should use), 2 teaspoons of baking soda is the amount of leavening needed for 8 cups of flour. This recipe has less than 2 cups. So, I anticipated that the cakes would fall, and in the recipe, Finamore says that the cakes will fall a little. Uh, yeah. Take another look at that picture. I’d say my cakes fell *a little*.

So, with visions of a perfect black and white cake crumpling around me, I decided to turn the cake (which tasted fine, by the way) into a chocolate trifle by making Finamore’s version of chocolate pudding (and knocking out another recipe while I was at it).

Fortunately, the chocolate pudding recipe is pretty straightforward. You whisk together, egg yolks, cornstarch and unsweetened cocoa. You temper this with hot milk/cream, then the whole thing goes back on the stovetop to cook. Once it has come to a boil, you take it off the heat and stir in bittersweet chocolate, butter and some vanilla.

I wondered about the lack of sugar in the recipe, but figured that the bittersweet chocolate would provide the sweetening. Wrong! The dry bitterness of the cocoa powder came through loud and clear. Fortunately, the pudding was still liquidy and hot enough that I was able to stir in about 1/4 cup of sugar with no problems (I halved the recipe, so if making a full recipe, you’d need more sugar).

In the end, I got my chocolate trifle and it tasted fine, but I’m sorely disappointed in Finamore. I can’t believe that these two recipes passed muster as is. I did a quick search to see if there had been any corrections posted, but I didn’t find anything. The fix for the chocolate pudding is easy. I’d dissolve 1/2 to 2/3 cup of sugar in the milk/cream mixture as it is heating. For the chocolate cake, I’d reduce the baking soda down to 1/2 teaspoon or use 1 teaspoon baking powder along with 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda.