Crumble of Lemon Curd

The first dish that Rémi tried to impress me with was homemade lemon curd. Or rather, a 2-week old lemon curd on bread. Errr...well, I can say that I wasn't too impressed. Moreover, it was a tad too sour for me.

Well, if he had known or seen this Lemon Curd Crumble recipe, he would have scored more points then.

The recipe came from the Crumble cookbook by Martine Lizambard, published by Solar Editions. I had decided to made it as I had some leftover crumbles from making an apple crumble.

Sometimes, one dish lead to another. From the first apple crumble late last week, we went on to have a second one, and now the lemon curd crumble. But because of a mistake I made when mixing cream and eggs together, I was left with an extra portion of cream and eggs mixture. So I made a quiche out of that earlier today. This will leave me with extra tart dough, so the apple crumble misjudgment is going to end with a pear tart tonight.

Lemon Curd Crumble (Crumble de Citron)
Serves 4 (I've divided the quantity, wanting to make just 2 cups, but still having enough lemon curd for 4 small ramekins)

100ml lemon juice (from about 2 lemons)
70g sugar
2 teaspoon cornflour
2 eggs
100ml liquid cream
1 branch of lemon verbena (it's something new to me, I tried replacing this with mint leaves)
Butter for greasing the ramekins

Crumble
60g flour
35g butter
40g sugar

According to the recipe, you may replace cream with whole milk yoghurt or white cheese. But I stuck to the cream.

Beat the cold cream with a hand beater until it becomes creamy (do not overbeat until it becomes chantilly cream). Mix the eggs in.

Boil the lemon juice with sugar for 2-3 minutes until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and add the verbena leaves. Cover and let the leaves infuse for a while. I had used 6 small mint leaves, but probably didn't use enough to make much of an impression. Anyway, discard the leaves and let the lemon syrup cool down.

Mix the lemon syrup with cornflour. Add the cream and egg mixture to it. Cook the mixture over low heat (or bain marie), stirring non-stop until it thickens. It took quite a while for the mixture to thicken (until it almost become like lemon curd), but do not be tempted to increase the heat, as you will end up with scramble eggs.

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease 4 ramekins and pour the lemon curd mixture into it.

Prepare the crumble. Using your fingertips, rub the cold butter into the flour until it resembles crumbles. Add sugar and mix well.

Bake the lemon mixture for 15 minutes, or more, until you see the surface browning and solidifying. Sprinkle the crumbles very gently on the surface and return to over for another 15-20 minutes, until the crumbles are golden brown.

Serve cold or just warm.