Posted by burntmuffin on 29th July 2010

Of Lemons and Other Things

We have 2 lemon trees in our garden. One came with the house, and the other was a tiny little shrub that we transplanted 3 times before we were satisfied with its location.

The first year we moved into our property, we had so many lemons from the established tree that most of them went to rot before we could use them all up. The 2nd year, Mr K decided to take the secateurs to the tree, and we only got a handful of lemons that 2nd and 3rd year. This year, the lemon tree exploded with flowers and fruit – TWICE. And the little tree also decided to fruit abundantly this year.

Big Lemon Tree

Small Lemon Tree

No matter how many lemons I use, there still seems to be far too many on the tree. I’ve made marmalade, used them in muffins and baking, Mr K raids the tree to make lemonade, and we even tried preserving them this year!

I would give lemons to friends and neighbours, but living where we are, almost every single property has a citrus tree of its own, if not 2 or 3.

I would give anything for our lime tree to burst into bloom and fruit. We’ve had that tree for 4 years and this year we got……

Drum roll please…..

3 small limes.

Limes

Anyway, onto the next topic which is food-related…

I love butter pound cake. And I’ve made a few lemon ones over the years. Then I came across 2 recipes – Cream Cheese Pound Cake (Bakerella’s) and Sour Cream Pound Cake. (I made them lemon flavoured by grating the zest of 2 large lemons and adding it to the mixture).

Which one tastes better – the Cream Cheese, the Sour Cream or the Butter?

I’d love to know your thoughts. :)

I made both recipes in the same week, and I’ve had different viewpoints from the other 2 in my household. My almost 3-year-old declares all of them yummy (no surprise there as any baking is a special treat). Mr K loves the cream cheese recipe – mainly because of the cream cheese icing on top.

Cream Cheese Pound Cupcakes

After all that cake, I made these lemon bars. They are very easy to make and very yummy – the base is like shortbread and the topping gives you that burst of lemon flavour. Next time, I’d grate even more rind into the topping mixture.

I only had a small tin, so I made some cupcake style

Then I thought, how about lemons and pasta? I looked through one of my recipe books and found a basic creamy lemon sauce. So we had that for dinner one night – it was weird as it smelled like baking but was savoury. Talk about confusing the brain! Here’s a very similar recipe that I am going to try when I have basil in the garden again.

And to finish off this post, something not lemon related.

Cinnamon rolls…… are just the best when they are hot out of the oven.

I visited The Pioneer Woman Cooks and got hooked looking at her delicious food photos. So I decided to make her cinnamon rolls for Sunday afternoon tea.

I halved her recipe and still ended up with 2 massive pans of rolls. Aren’t they pretty?

Baked Cinnamon Rolls

Yumm..

We polished off a whole pan in one sitting. They were delicious and next time I will definitely make the icing.

Check out my related posts:

  1. Sweet and Salty Cake
  2. BAKED brownies
  3. Another post about blueberries..
  4. Malt-Ball Cake

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