Meyer Lemons and me are having a moment right now. They’ve been on my radar for a while now but for what ever reason, this year I became obsessed. They are SO good! Floral, bright and zingy, they are everything citrus should be. Even the zest is phenomenal. I’ve been buying them non-stop this winter which means we’ve had get creative with our lemon consumption and aside from them making a regular appearance in our cocktails, lemon curd is by far my favorite thing to make with them. I did not grow up eating lemon curd and now my grownup self is making up for lost time by having a jar of this continuously stocked in my fridge.

Lemon curd is magical. It is basically lemon, eggs, sugar, and butter whisked together and cooked into a velvety creamy perfection. It is delightful drizzled over ice cream, baked into a tart shell, layered into a vanilla cake, or spread over your toast in the morning. That last suggestion should be taken very seriously because aside from the sugar how is it any different than a hollandaise sauce?

Lemon curd is not terribly hard to make but it has a bit of a reputation of being finicky. It can curdle quite quickly sometimes leaving you with a scrambled eggy slop. The trick is to cook it over low heat, slowly and be ready to remove it from the heat as soon as it starts to thicken. Have your cold butter cubed and ready to throw in and when all else fails, run it through a sieve to remove any pesky eggs that may have overcooked in the process. Some recipes have you temper the eggs with the warm lemon juice but I’ve found that to be unnecessary as you can achieve the same results by just whisking everything together to start. Again, the trick is to not cook it over too high a heat, lemon curd can go from almost there to scrambled eggs way quicker that you would think possible.

If you don’t have Meyer lemons just use lemons. It will still produce a delicious curd but if you wanted to add a bit of dimension to it just add a couple of tablespoons of orange juice to the lemon juice. I use a bit of normal lemon juice with my Meyer lemons because the floral notes of the Meyer lemons need to be balanced out a bit and plain lemon juice does the trick. Technically any citrus can be turned into a curd so once you get the hang of lemon why not branch out into lime or even blood orange curd?