Puddings aren’t my forte really. Oh, I love eating them, we all know that. But my efforts at making them are often found, shall we say, lacking. I told you about the Crema Catalana that didn’t quite set, and there have been plenty of others in the past that were embarrassments on the plate.
With that in mind, I’ve adopted a strategy of sticking to tried and tested recipes when we’ve got guests, just in case…
So when we had some visitors recently, I thought I’d pull out the old lemon posset recipe, with the nice little addition of some yummy Joe Delucci’s ice-cream that I was sent to try. Lemon posset is nice and easy (it must be if I can do it), you can make it in advance, and in my experience it’s a bit of a crowd-pleaser.
With this in mind, I thought I’d share it with you, just in case you want to give it a try. Because I’ve made it a few times I have have my own rough amounts of ingredients now, and it still seems to work out okay. Here they are:-
Ingredients
- 600ml double cream
- 130-150g caster sugar
- Juice and zest of two lemons
Method
- Put the cream and sugar in a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring while the sugar dissolves.
- Allow to simmer for a few minutes and add the lemon zest and juice, still stirring. Save a tiny bit of zest for decoration if you like.
- Take off the heat and sieve to get the lumps of zest out. Pour into ramekins or glasses and leave to cool.
- Put in the fridge to set for a few hours, then serve. You can sprinkle the remaining zest over if you like, and add any other accompaniment.
Now, most lemon posset recipes seem to serve them up with biscuits or biscotti of some sort, but I decided to try something a bit different. I’d been sent some Joe Delucci’s gelato to try – their new winter flavour of creme caramel and the bestselling coconut gelato, which are stocked by Tesco.
I decided the sweetness of the coconut, which was a yummy creamy base with fine pieces of coconut to add a lovely natural texture, would go nicely with the tart-yet-sweet posset, as well as jazzing it up a bit instead of just serving up a pot of yellow cream. My quenelles could probably do with a bit of work but it did the trick and made a nice, easy yet good-looking dessert.
I’m happy to say our guests – who happened to be my dad (not a big dessert fan) and his fiancee (the queen of cooking, especially puddings) – were impressed and thoroughly enjoyed their possets. Seriously, pudding praise from my dad is a rare thing, so I’m stocking that one up in the ‘win’ section.
You’ll notice we were’t just sent the coconut Joe Delucci’s, but the creme caramel too. I’m afraid I couldn’t do a recipe involving this as Mr M couldn’t help but snaffle it pretty much as soon as it arrived. He is a massive ice cream fan (apparently ice cream only counts as a ‘drink’ – it’s just frozen milkshake – so you don’t have to worry about the calories!). He usually prefers chocolate but this creme caramel got a big thumbs up from him (okay, and me too. Of course I tried some ;-)).
The 500ml Joe Delucci’s tubs are sold in Tesco, at £3.99. I was sent mine for free to have a try, but I wasn’t asked to write a positive review. The lemon posset idea was all my own, as were the ingredients.
