Custards and Curds

Blueberry Lemon Curd

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Blueberry lemon curd

Don’t you hate it when your favorite site or publication has a “special takeover issue”, when they change the title and mess with the format purely for the purposes of advertising or to big up their latest feature? I didn’t like it when Whizzer and Chips did a “Chips and Whizzer” edition in 1979, and I don’t like it now. That’s the reason why we’re not temporarily changing the name of the site to “Curds with Knives” because, frankly, otherwise, that’s exactly the sort of thing we’d do. I don’t know if it’s the fact that lemon prices have dipped lately, I know it’s not because we have a glut of eggs (because out of seven chickens, only one of them is laying) but for some reason, we’re getting rather obsessed with making lemon curd and variations thereof.

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Seriously Lemony Lemon Curd

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Lemon curd is a delicious sweet, tart condiment that’s really easy to make with just a few ingredients. You’ll never use store-bought curd again!

This is a repost from a few years back, but we make this curd all the time, and in fact just cooked up a double-batch. We make this for friends, and now some of those friends have started making it for their friends, so our lemon curd is now all over Beacon! Read on for our original inspiration…

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Vanilla and Turmeric Pannacotta with Hibiscus Syrup

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Vanilla and Turmeric Pannacotta with Hibiscus Syrup

Vanilla and turmeric-flavored pannacotta with hibiscus syrup. A) A rich, creamy, colorful dessert, or B) a murder victim on a teaplate? You be the judge! (Hint: It’s A.)

Every now and again with this blog, we create a recipe so unrepentantly weird that it seems a shame not to share it with the world. This week, we’d like to introduce to you a dish based on a gorse* pannacotta that we encountered a few years ago at one of our favorite restaurants, Llys Meddig in Newport, Wales.

Our vacation snapshot of the original dessert is too low-quality to share with you – suffice it to say that it was a delight and well worth trying to recreate. Pannacotta is pretty much a three-ingredient recipe (cream, sugar, gelatin) in its simplest form; all we would need, apparently, is some gorse.

So if you ever need to make a dessert suitable for a Murder Mystery night, we’ve got you covered.

*explanation of what the heck gorse is below

Vanilla and Turmeric Pannacotta
The turmeric gives these pannacotta a beautiful golden color and a delicate spice.

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French Onion Strata – a savory bread pudding

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French onion strata

The flavors of French onion soup transported into a hearty, cheesy strata. The heart of bread pudding paired with the soul of a classic soup – synergy on a plate.

We’re big fans of bread pudding of almost every stripe. With one basic method and either a savory or a sweet set of ingredients, you can throw together a wide variety of dishes with bread, eggs, and milk: the framework. We generally reserve the term “bread pudding” for a sweet variation, and “strata” for the savory version where there’s usually more eggs involved. It works so well, for the last few years we’ve exclusively used a strata as a Thanksgiving-day stuffing. We liked the technique so much, we wanted to find out what else we could do with it.

French Onion Strata - a savory bread pudding
Cheesy, gooey deliciousness.

Note: This recipe is part of our ongoing series with Serious Eats. You can also find this recipe, and many other great ones on their site.

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Mini Dutch Babies with Lemon Curd and Blueberries

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Mini Dutch Baby Pancakes cooked in individual cast iron skillets. They puff up and turn a beautiful golden brown before we spoon in homemade lemon curd and sprinkle with fresh blueberries.