Lemons are in season and, for me, that means that I can’t have too many lemon dessert options to choose from. I make lots of lemon bars and lemon curd, but I’ve seen lots of delicious sounding ideas out there on other blogs that inspired me to do even more with lemon, and they’ll surely inspire you, too.
- Tutti Dolci‘s Cream Cheese Lemon White Chocolate Cookies are a great springtime spin on a traditional chocolate chip cookie. The chewy cookies have cream cheese in the dough, which gives them a subtly tangy cheesecake flavor, and they’re accented with Meyer lemon zest. The cream cheese and lemon provide the perfect contrast to the sweet white chocolate chips that stud these cookies, making them almost like a bite sized lemon and white chocolate cheesecake that you can eat without a fork.
- Many people don’t try to make hard candies at home, but the process is surprisingly easy as long as you have a candy thermometer and are patient enough to watch it closely while you work. The Lemon Drop Candies from Southern Fatty are a fun recipe to start with if you want to experiment with making hard candies. They’re made with lemon extract and citric acid to ensure that the finished candies have a strong, bright lemon flavor that you can really taste (you can’t add enough lemon juice to the candy recipe to get the same kind of flavor with juice alone). The candies are perfect for snacking and, since they’re intended to be a little abstract when they’re finished, you can focus on the process without worrying too much about turning your sugar into an extremely complicated candy.
- The Coconut Cupcakes With Passion Fruit Curd that Vintage Kitchen Notes baked have a combination of some of my favorite ingredients – coconut, lemon and passion fruit – for a perfectly tropical treat. The coconut cupcakes are moist and flavorful, with just the right amount of lemon to show off the sweetness of the coconut. They’re filled with homemade passion fruit curd and topped with cream cheese frosting.
- Trials in Food baked up a Lemon Ricotta Blueberry Pound Cake, which combines zesty lemons and rich blueberries in a very moist loaf that you could serve for breakfast or for dessert. Ricotta cheese is the key to keeping this bread moist, and it blends in so seamlessly that you would never know that it is there, giving the pound cake its deliciously dense texture. This recipe also comes with a few healthy substitutions that you can make if you want to lighten it up after your holiday indulgences.
- Meyer lemons are one of my favorite lemon varieties to work with during citrus season, and My Baking Addiction shared some tempting Meyer Lemon Meltaways. These meltaways are shortbread-like and get their name from their tender, melt-in-your-mouth texture. They’re made with Meyer lemon juice and Meyer lemon zest, so when they do meltaway, you’re left with a delicious lemony flavor in your mouth. You could make these cookies with other citrus, too, for a little variety during citrus season.