Since learning that there is nearly always palm oil in lemon curd I have learned to make my own. Palm oil (unless responsibly/sustainably sourced) can be very harmful to the environment for many reasons.
Lemon curd is super easy to make and doesn’t cost much (more than a jar in the shop but I promise you once you’ve made your own you won’t want to buy inferior lemon curd again!) You can put it on toast, stir it through yoghurt, use it on lemon meringue pie, the possibilities are endless! Here’s my recipe for blueberry and lemon curd cake.
Lemon curd
Juice & zest of 5 lemons
400ml water
300g caster sugar
2 tablespoons plain flour
4 tablespoons cornflour
5 egg yolks (I use the whites to make meringue so they aren’t wasted!)
100g butter
Cake
240g self raising flour
100g butter
100g caster sugar
3 eggs
Lemon curd (I used quite a lot – about 7 heaped tablespoons of my homemade lemon curd)
Blueberries (I used a large handful from a bag of frozen ones that I defrosted)
Icing
180g caster sugar
Juice of a lemon
Method
Make the lemon curd
Combine water, sugar lemon zest, juice, flour in a pan. Stir over a medium heat until the mixture is boiling and thickening.
Stir in the butter.
In a separate bowl whisk the egg yolks.
Slowly add around 100ml of the hot lemon sauce while whisking constantly until combined.
Then add the egg mixture back into the pan and bring to the boil and whisk constantly until thick.
Set aside to cool
Make the cake
Cream butter and sugar together.
Add 4 heaped tablespoons of cooled lemon curd
Add the eggs one at a time while whisking with a teaspoon of the flour each time (I do this to stop the mixture splitting)
Fold in the remainder of the flour
Fold in the blueberries and 3 heaped tablespoons of lemon curd – you don’t want to fully mix it so you get ribbons of curd through the final cake.
Pour into a 2lb loaf tin
Bake for around an hour or until a skewer comes out clean!
NB – oven temperatures – my oven is ridiculously hot so whilst I would say bake at 180 degrees centigrade but I put my oven at 160!
While the cake is still hot from the oven mix the caster sugar and lemon juice together and pour over the cake (I put a plate underneath to catch the drops and then poured it over again so it was really thick and crunchy on the top)