I love lemon: five lemon recipes that I have made

I recently transfered my photos over to a new computer. Unfortunately, I did a terrible job moving them to iPhoto and the order is all jumbled. Fortunately, this made me notice that I have a lot of lemon recipes to share! (You may have noticed this from my post on making a caramelized lemon tart for Thanksgiving). It helps that there is a lemon tree not far from my apartment that had a good crop this year. Lemons are still in season, so it’s a good time to make something other than lemonade.

I’ve got five kinds of recipes to share, (starting with the most recent): pizza, cupcakes, cookie(s), biscotti, and lasagna. The photos aren’t always the greatest, but I’ve tried to include links to the recipes and notes on my mistakes on modification.

Recipe #1 Brussels Sprouts-Lemon Pizza

This recipe is from the March 2012 issue of Martha Stewart Living, and it doesn’t seem to be up on their website yet (EDIT: I feel weird about posting it here because of this, but you can find a version of the recipe over at this blog). I really liked this pizza, but I made a few errors and I would also make some changes. First, my own mistakes: I used 1 lb of dough instead of 3/4 as suggested because I was in a hurry, not noticing that my pan was also a little smaller than the one in the recipe. The result: this photo looked great, but I had to cook it for another 15-20 minutes for the dough to cook! By that time the brussles sprouts were extra crispy.

My only change beyond that was substituting grated parmesan cheese for the grated romano, which worked fine. The change I would make next time: MOAR lemon! Seriously, 1/2 a lemon on this pizza wasn’t enough for my taste. But then again I love lemon. A lot.

Recipe #2 Lemon yogurt cupcakes with lemon buttercream frosting

This is the second time I have made these cupcakes, this time for my friend’s birthday party. It’s a recipe from food.com—and it’s a keeper. It’s got a nice lemony flavor without being too sour or too sweet. The frosting recipe is also on the website, though supposedly it came from the company Sprinkles. It is quite delicious, the perfect pairing.

I only made one mistake this time but it was a big one! I forgot to check that the oven rack was in the center of the oven, I had moved it down for another recipe but hadn’t put it back. I made some mini cupcakes as you can see above, but a number of them (all without blueberries) burned on the bottom and never made it to the party.

My own changes to the recipe: The obvious one is that I added blueberries to some of the cupcakes and topped those cupcakes with blueberries. I made a double batch, so one with 1/2 cup frozen blueberries and one without. I think the frozen factor helped keep the mini versions from burning. My other change is to the frosting recipe—I only made one quarter (1/4) of the original recipe. For a double batch of cupcakes! The frosting recipe said it makes 12 servings, same as the cupcake recipe, but I think that’s only true if you pipe an inch or two of frosting onto every cupcake a la Sprinkles. If you do not, you won’t need that much frosting!

Recipe #3 Vegan Lemon Cornmeal Poppyseed Biscotti with Lemon Glaze

Yes, something for the vegans! This is from the book “Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar,” and you can read the recipe here. I didn’t make any mistakes that I know of, but I did make changes.

First, I added dried sweetened cranberries. The cornmeal is nice but the flavor is strong and the texture is dry, so cranberries helped balance that out. Second, I added a lemon glaze after I took this photo. I don’t remember which recipe I used but this one would work fine. Basically, I wanted more lemon flavor! These were Christmas gifts for family members this year, so I wanted to make sure they were really tasty.

Recipe #4 Lemon Cornmeal Sheet Cookie

Lemon and cornmeal together seem to be a theme here, as seen in Martha Stewart’s recipe. The only change I made to this recipe was removing the anise seeds altogether—not my favorite flavor and they didn’t seem necessary. I would say that “serves 4” is a bit generous—my sheet cookie came out smaller than I expected. But we had it for dessert on New Years Eve and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Recipe #5 Sausage, Chard, and Lemon Lasagna

Another poor quality cell phone photo, but a great meal! Once again this is a recipe from Martha Stewart Living. Perhaps a little more involved of a recipe, but worth it. We made this quite a while ago but I don’t recall any changes—only that we had to look around a bit to find no-boil lasagna noodles. Perfect flavors to compliment the lemon slices. It was so tasty I didn’t get a photo until after some was eaten!

I hope you find a recipe you’d like to make. I think my next few blog posts won’t be about food though—I’ve got some knitting projects to share, and I have a whole new topic to write about now that it is almost spring: gardening!