Pudding
welcome to lemon land
new on bbs
Lemon Pudding
But ofc I’d have a lemon pudding for you before I had chocolate or anything else ;p This one is super creamy, uses yolks only (no starch) and has a bright, tart lemon flavor.
underrated lemon land recipes, please see:
Lemon Pound Cake
Super soft tender cake that melts in your mouth. Out of the oven the cake is drizzled with a fresh lemon syrup, giving the edges and ends a tart, sharply lemon flavor.
Lemon Shortbread
Crumbly, buttery shortbread that bursts with a sweet and tart lemon flavor. These shortbread get their flavor from fresh zest, lemon extract, vanilla paste and high quality butter. The dough is rested twice to enhance the lemony flavor of the shortbread and baked twice for extra crispness.
Soft & Chewy Lemon Cookies
Lemon cookies that are sort of like a lemon snickerdoodle: soft and slightly chewy, these cookies are bursting with lemon.
Lemon Chess Pie
Smooth and buttery filling with a bright, tart lemon flavor, housed in an all butter pie crust.
Lemon Rolls
Milk bread dough + lemon curd + a heavy cream bath… then a glaze and more lemon curd on top. It’s a DREAM lemon roll.
From the (mid) February Archives
2025: Lemon Tart (almond tart shell, lemon curd filling)
2024: Meyer Lemon Curd
2023: Whipped Brown Butter (great for toast!) & Hazelnut Cake with Hazelnut Penuche
2022: Orange Layer Cake (two layers of orange cake, orange white chocolate ganache and a cream cheese orange frosting)
2021: Raspberry Brownie Pie (a layer of fudgy brownie with a layer of raspberry custard on top)
2020: Egg Yolk Chocolate Chip Cookies (still one of my most popular recipes)
baker’s review
“How amazing that I would call lemon curd “easy!” I even love that you call for cooking in 30 second increments because that’s the button on the microwave. Makes such sense instead of the 45 second recipes I have seen. Oh, and the brilliance of using whole eggs! Thank you! I hated having leftover whites with my old recipe. And using that jar was genius! And amounts for making a small portion – perfect! I like the idea of having a jar in the fridge as a condiment, but I don’t think it would withstand the empty spoons that would go searching for a little citrus gold! Yum and Thank You!” Carla on Mason Jar Microwave Lemon Curd
reads
“Amazon’s reliance on public subsidies for its underpaid labor force has been well known for years. In 2023, researchers at the University of Illinois conducted a survey of Amazon warehouse workers across 42 states and found that 33% of those surveyed had used public assistance programs in the previous three months, including 23% who had used SNAP. Eighty-nine percent of the survey respondents said they work at least 30 hours per week, the threshold used by the Internal Revenue Service for determining if someone is considered a full-time worker.
Walmart not only relies on SNAP to make up for its low wages, but it also benefits more than any other company from people using food stamps to buy their groceries. According to a Numerator survey covering the 12 months ending July 31, 2025, Walmart is the largest retailer for SNAP benefit redemption in the U.S., receiving 25.8% of all SNAP dollars.
Other companies that frequently appear at the top of the state lists include McDonald’s, DoorDash, Uber, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General. The dollar stores accept SNAP, so are double-dipping in the same way as Walmart.” The People Scamming Welfare Are Not Who You Think, More Perfect Union.
“The permitted trucks carry secondary products such as soft drinks, instant noodles, chocolate bars, cigarettes, and coffee, many of which are listed on global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement lists because their companies explicitly support funding genocide and sending weapons to Israel. This is not incidental, but rather an intentional approach from Israel to make up for the economic losses that have resulted from the global BDS movement, by depriving a famished population of necessities — adequate sources of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Flooding markets with snacks instead of grains, eggs, fruits, and vegetables is not an oversight; it is another form of systemic annihilation.
People who had been deliberately starved for so long could not, in the immediate aftermath of the fragile truce, distinguish what was healthy and how to appropriately reintroduce it. They ran out to markets, in fear of any sudden escalation and another bout of deprivation, filling their baskets with whatever was edible. The random, uncoordinated reintroduction of food into already fragile bodies — often more harmful than nourishing — can lead to numerous severe health complications. It may also result in rapid, unhealthy weight gain over a short span of time, which, in turn, could create the illusion that starvation no longer exists in Gaza — allowing the world to turn its back with a fleeting sense of conscience.” In Gaza, We’re Struggling to Reintroduce Foods to Bodies Adjusted to Starvation, Truthout.
“In 2023, Six of my cookbooks were stolen by Meta to use in its training of AI. It is really the worst kind of spine-tingling feeling to find out that one of the most wealthy people on the planet has stolen a decade of my work, all that sacrifice and blood and sweat while raising a small family. And for what — so that AI can write sloppy, pointless cookbooks for us and attempt to put already poorly paid creators out of work? Have you seen an AI cookbook? It is one of the most hideous, nonsensical, useless things I have ever seen. The recipes obviously aren’t tested — they’re not even real recipes. No one has edited them, let alone tasted them. They aren’t things anyone wants to eat (Bratwurst ice cream, anyone?). It is total slop. AI-generated photographs of unrecognisable items that don’t match the description of the so-called recipe. A fish skewer recipe accompanied by a photograph of what appears to be a smoothie. Directions that make no sense. Ingredients that make even less sense, like garlic bread calling for 5 cups of French bread. Why would anyone want this? Cookbooks written by humans take months, years of trial and error to make, while recipes are tested and tasted, with human traits such as passion and nostalgia. There is an entire team involved to make sure that they not only make sense and are practical but that they look good too.” Why we need cookbooks more than ever, Notes from Emiko’s Kitchen.
baker’s notes
Someone left me a question in our group chat (did you know we had one? I have been terrible at using it tbh) asking about locked posts so I wanted to explain: because I had a tiered subscription model, substack auto-paywalls posts that are older than two weeks. I no longer have paid subscriptions on though so technically no one can access the full posts after those two weeks. I am not inclined to change it bc if all my posts are available anytime, there’s less of an incentive to receive my emails. There is a backload of really amazing content there though; probably over 50 exclusive recipes, plus lots of baking tutorials, and tips and if enough people are interested, I will open it up for membership. Let me know if you are?
I have been on a mad hunt for raw hazelnuts for a few weeks, I can usually get a decent price for a big bag from costco, or a slightly higher price for a smaller bag from Trader Joes, but have not been able find them anywhere. I did a little digging online and it turns out there was a late spring frost in Turkey, which produces 70% of the worlds hazelnuts: “ [The] freak weather event caused irretrievable losses on farms in almost half the nation’s provinces, deepening pressure on global and domestic food prices, which were already rising at a record rate in Turkey.” (source) The shortage will impact nutella too: “The stakes are high for brands like Ferrero, which makes Nutella and reportedly uses around a quarter of the world’s hazelnut supply. Nutella consists mainly of sugar and palm oil, but hazelnuts make up about 13% of the recipe. Millions of jars of the chocolate spread are sold annually, meaning even small price rises drive up production costs and squeeze margins.” (source). Seems like we’ll have to wait for the hazelnut farms to rebound =(
Another ingredient I’ve been struggling to find? Dutch process cocoa. This one is a bit alarming for me, I use dutch in almost all my cocoa based recipes, I can’t even remember the last time I bought natural. I haven’t found an explanation for this but my usuals (Guittard, Ghirardelli dutch, and even KAB’s brand) have been missing from stores for the past month. This brings up something else I wanted to discuss with you: using natural cocoa versus dutched cocoa. I’ve gotten a few questions on the blog lately asking to swap in natural, or why I have dutch process in cakes that have baking soda. My guess is the person has read (in one case it was chatgpt who told them this, sigh) that dutch is neutral so its acidity is low and should be combined with baking powder; whereas natural cocoa is acidic and should be combined with baking soda to create the chemical reaction to rise. This is a hardline many baking articles take but it’s not always correct. There are other things to consider: first, there may be other ingredients in the recipe that are acidic in which case you may still use baking soda when you have dutch cocoa; there may be brown sugar, buttermilk, yogurt, etc. which will cause a reaction and rise. Second, did you know cocoa’s differ in fat content too? Natural cocoa tends to have a higher fat percentage than black cocoa, and even dutch process cocoas differ in their fat content from one to another. The type of cocoa used can also impact cookie spread: when I was testing for these black cocoa cookies I had started with my regular double chocolate cookie recipe which uses dutch cocoa and found the spread to be so much they were like flattened pancakes, I had to rework the recipe in several ways to avoid that. To sum up, there is much to consider when it comes to cocoa that’s beyond the leavening agent, and it’s really best to… well you already know what I’m going to say, follow the recipe - especially when it’s been created and tested by a human ;-)
warmly,
sam