Lemons

One of our children had brought in two buckets of lemons that he had picked off his lemon tree at home. We talked about what we could do with them.
The first idea was to make a lemon cake. We squeezed and grated the zest off the lemons to add to the cake mix. Then we baked it in the oven to have for afternoon tea. It was delicious!
We also decided to make some lemon curd in the microwave. The recipe asked for a lot of lemon juice so we squeezed and squeezed the lemons and kept measuring in the jug to see when we had enough. Finally, after about 20 minutes of squeezing there was enough juice. We added sugar, eggs, lemon zest and butter and then cooked it in the microwave for about 10 minutes. We left the lemon curd to cool and the children were surprised to see that it had gone all thick after an hour.
We had used the lemon curd in our sandwiches for morning tea but we still had heaps left so we decided to make lemon curd and jam tarts. We added butter to flour and rubbed them together until the mixture was like breadcrumbs and then we mixed in water to make our pastry dough. The children rolled out the balls of pastry and cut out circles to go into the muffin tins. We put lemon curd into some of the pastry cases and jam into others and baked them in the oven.
We really appreciate donations of fruit and vegetables from parents and we always try to come up with lots of different and interesting ways to utilize seasonal fruit and vegetables.