Recipes are all about sharing. Sharing the method and technique, and ultimately sharing the food across the table with family and friends. I love getting recipe recommendations, and a friend shared this one with me.

Step into a world of nostalgia and refreshment with a classic homemade lemonade recipe. Inspired by childhood memories in Papua New Guinea, where lemon trees, locally known as “mulis,” bore an abundance of sour, golden fruits, this recipe captures the essence of simple pleasures. Fresh lemonade was more than a drink—it was a ritual of hospitality and a celebration of nature’s bounty.

Tartest Lemon Tart is definitely the tartest, most pucker-worthy, and bitter tart I've tasted. But it's perfect. A spoonful of lemon with a chaser of homemade vanilla ice cream was sour, sweet, and bitter all in one bite.

You need a blender or food processor to make this dessert. After removing the seeds from the lemons, all the ingredients are whizzed to a smooth consistency.

I baked some of the mixture in hollowed-out half-lemons at a lower temperature of 300°F for 30 to 35 minutes (because my first batch of minis exploded). I also baked some in little antique tin molds for about the same length of time.

To serve, I spooned some vanilla ice cream on the side and placed an amaretti cookie in each.

Recipe: Tartest Lemon Tart

Makes: 8 servings

Ingredients:

I love lemon desserts, but I've never made lemon bars. These are tart lemon bars that are a welcome reprieve from the sweeter dessert fare.

It's like a lemon meringue pie with a shortbread crust and no meringue. Tangy, delicious, and especially good with Dorie Greenspan's peppermint cream.

Bottom
The bottom is a shortbread-like crust that you can easily push into the pan using a measuring cup or your fingers. Ellie's has icing sugar and vanilla that might be even more flavorful. Then you bake it in the oven for a bit.

Middle
The filling is easy because you just whisk it and then bake it off (after you've baked the crust).

Top
Dust with icing sugar, and you're done. You can top with peppermint cream for even more decadence.

Recipe: Lemon Bars

You can find a video of a similar recipe for Lemon Bars here.

Florida is famous for its key lime pie, and in 2006 it became the official state pie. Key limes were grown in Florida before a hurricane in 1926 wiped out the crop. Now, key limes come from Mexico and a more hardy Persian lime is grown in Florida.

Key limes are smaller and more tart than regular limes. They have lighter and thinner green skin (yellow when ripe) than the more common lime. Here’s a link to a picture of a ripe key lime with two Persian limes.

Since key limes are so small, they don’t have much juice. This means you have to squeeze a lot of key limes to get 1 cup of juice! Thankfully, I have a food processor!


Bottom
Although some key lime pies use a pastry crust, Dorie’s recipe calls for a graham cracker one. What could be simpler? She even suggests buying one, but since they’re so simple to make, I wanted to make a homemade version.

On top of the crust is a layer of coconut and cream that’s been reduced to a delicious syrup. I’m a coconut fan, so the more coconut in a dessert, the better! A long time ago, I travelled to Papua New Guinea and visited a small island off the coast of Madang where a young school boy shimmied up a tall coconut tree in his barefeet to retrieve a fresh coconut as a snack for us to enjoy. It was the best tasting coconut I’ve ever had.

Middle
Three ingredients make up the key lime part of this dessert: sweetened condensed milk, lime juice, and egg yolks.

History says that there were no cows in Key West in the good ol’ days, so canned milk was the only dairy product available. Evaporated milk is not the same as sweetened condensed milk‑the key word being “sweet”. In both, water is removed from the milk. But, about 40% of sweetened condensed milk is sugar. It is a thick, yellowish color often used in caramel, toffee, and fudge (and Dulce de Leche).

Top
A Swiss meringue with coconut folded in converts this tart into a pie (a tart is topless!). Sometimes whipped cream is used instead, and is so much easier than the fickle meringue.

This Swiss type of meringue is characterized by heating the egg whites and sugar on the stove to melt the sugar and then whisking with a mixer until cool and doubled in volume. When you heat the eggs on the stove, you must constantly whisk them so that you don’t get sugary, scrambled eggs (as I did in attempt #1). Also, you should take the eggs off the heat when they reach 130˚F (or as Dorie says “hot to the touch”). Meringue is best put on your pie as soon as the pie is cool. Meringue waits for no one and will separate if ignored (as I found out with attempt #2).

After finally getting some meringue on these mini pies, I threw them into the freezer, melted some chocolate, and then dipped the frozen pies into the chocolate (à la Dairy Queen). Adding more sweetness to this already sweet dessert seemed like a good idea and one that might make it more like the Mounds bar Dorie talks about in her introduction to the recipe! You could also brush the bottom of the crust with chocolate instead, but you’d miss out on the photo opportunity!

Playing around: Dulce de Leche
In my reading, I found out that the popular Dulce de Leche that keeps popping up in posts from food bloggers is actually sweetened condensed milk that’s been cooked for hours to form an even sweeter milk that’s caramel-like. I was able to find a jar of Dulce de Leche at my local grocery store, but I also wanted to try making it. It didn’t sound hard. Just put an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk into a pot of water, cover the can with 3-4 inches so that it’s completely submerged, and boil for 4 hours, making sure the water always covers it so that it doesn’t explode! Then, cool on a rack. Sounds easy enough.

The homemade version was thicker and not as sticky as the store-bought one. It had a nicer, nuttier, full flavor. I then tried replacing the sweetened condensed milk with the Dulce de Leche in this Florida Pie, and it turned out great. Tart and sweet all at once.

I also crushed chocolate-covered wafers for the crust instead of using a graham cracker crust.


Topped with whipped cream (because I wasn’t about to attempt meringue #4) and some flaked, toasted coconut, and it was ready to be served to the sweetest tooth in town.

Recipe: Florida Pie

You can find the recipe for Florida Pie in the book Baking: From My Home to Yours (affiliate link) by Dorie Greenspan. To see how the rest of the TWD group fared with this week's recipe, click here and then click on each blogger!

Tasting Notes
This is another sweet dessert, but the tartness of the key limes is a welcome reprieve. The Dulce de Leche version was good too--sweeter and more tangy. Another winning recipe from Dorie.

Recipe for Next Week (May 20)
Traditional Madeleines on pages 166-168 chosen by Tara of Smells Like Home.

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Weekends are a time to kick back, sit on the deck, and sip some lemonade or limeade with friends and family.
The only hard part about this drink is squeezing the juice from the limes. This time, I used key limes which have about a teaspoon of juice in each, so I was squeezing for awhile. You could also use lemons or regular Persian limes.


Key limes are smaller than regular limes. They are a lighter green (yellow when ripe), thinner-skinned, and more tart than a regular lime.

Key lime, Meyer lemon, Regular lemon tower

Recipe for The Most Extraordinary Fresh Limeade

2 cups water
1 cup sugar
1 cup lime juice (or lemon juice), freshly squeezed

Melt water and sugar until it boils. Remove from heat and cool. Stir in the freshly squeezed lime juice. Chill.

In a glass, pour 1 cup lime juice mixture and 1 cup water. Serve with ice.

Given that I live in Canada and Meyer lemons don’t grow on trees up here (at least not outside in the frigid winters we have), I thought I would forgo the 100-mile diet and try to get some Meyer lemons to test this recipe a bit. I was able to find some beautiful Meyer lemons shipped here from California, land of milk and honey, or at least Meyer lemons and other yummy fruit. I wanted to do a taste test with regular lemons and Meyer lemons to see which lemon tart we liked best.

Meyer lemons are a cross between a traditional lemon and an orange, possibly a mandarin. It was introduced to the United States by “agriculture explorer” Frank Meyer. How do you go about getting a job as an “agriculture explorer”, I wonder? Meyer lemons are smaller, rounder, and have a more orange-y, less tart flavor.


A cookie crust
For the crust, I thought I’d try the pâte sablée with walnuts from Dorie’s cookbook. The combination of the slightly bitter walnuts with the citrus of lemon and the sweetness of the tart sounded too good to pass up. I was not disappointed. The crunch of the cookie-crust held up well as finger food even. The dough was dry at first, but I added a few fingertips of water to bring it together, and it rolled out fine.

One tip I’ve gleaned from all my research is to roll the dough out onto the removable base of the tart pan. Then, replace the rim and pinch the dough up the sides. That way, you know how large the pastry needs to be for your tart or pie pan.

Garnishes
I had some fun with garnishes for this recipe. I melted some leftover couverture chocolate from last week’s Tuesdays with Dorie and made chocolate hearts.

I also made some citrus rinds steeped in syrup. First I boiled 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water until the sugar was melted. Then, I added slices of lemons, Meyer lemons, and kumquats, and a vanilla bean split open and scraped. I gently boiled this mixture for a bit, and then let it steep for 4 hours and refrigerated it until I was ready to use it. Not only do they look good, but they taste delicious.

Recipe: The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart

You can find the recipe for The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart at this blog (Starting from Scratch) or in the book Baking: From My Home to Yours (affiliate link) by Dorie Greenspan. To see how the rest of the TWD group fared with this week's recipe, click here and then click on each blogger!

Hollandaise versus Lemon Curd
One last thing I wanted to try after making this recipe was Hollandaise sauce. The technique provided in Dorie’s cookbook as given to her by the famous pastry chef Pierre Hermé made me think of Hollandaise sauce. Both Hollandaise and Lemon curd have the same flavor profile: emulsified eggs and butter with a splash of lemon. But one has sugar and more lemon while the other has savory spices and water. So, after making the lemon tarts, I tried following the same technique to make a Hollandaise sauce using these ingredients:

2 eggs
2 tablespoons lemon juice, plus more to taste
¼ cup water
Salt
Pepper
Cayenne pepper
5¼ ounces unsalted butter, cut into tablespoon-size pieces, at room temperature

First, in a stainless steel sauce pan, I whisked the eggs, lemon juice, water, salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper over medium heat until it came to 180°F. At around 160°F I quickly pulled it off the heat since it looked like it was about to curdle. But I bravely put it back on the heat and whisked madly so that it wouldn’t curdle. The second it hit 180°F, I quickly poured it into the food processor (since my blender broke during the making of the lemon tarts!) and let it cool a bit. Then I added the butter in chunks, and just like that I had a beautiful, creamy, emulsified Hollandaise sauce. Easy as pie!
Tasting Notes
This tart is amazing. I preferred the sweetness and orange hint of the Meyer lemon tart, but others liked the more citrus lemon flavor of the traditional lemon tart. The Meyer lemon curd was less firm than the regular lemon curd, which had a texture similar to butter. Although it didn’t take away from the taste, I’m wondering why the Meyer lemon curd didn’t get as firm. If anyone has some ideas about why, let me know. Does it have something to do with the pectin levels in each? After spending the night in the refrigerator, the Meyer lemon curd was a firm consistency, however. This is definitely a keeper recipe, in any case.

In my reading, I found this great article about Meyer lemons called "What do you do with a Meyer lemon? Here is a list of 100 things!" I'm sure some of these things could be applied to the regular lemon as well. Enjoy!

Recipe for Next Week (April 15)
Marshmallows on pages 404-405 chosen by Judy of Judy’s Gross Eats

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Lime Sorbet Recipe