When life hands you lemons…

OK, so you know how on Friday I said that I had a ton of meyer lemons I needed to use?  Well, the scones really only took one plus the zest from a couple of more.  I still had a bunch of lemons.

My next thought was lemon bars.  They are tasty, easy, and brightly lemony.  Plus since our chickens started laying again last week, we have plenty of eggs to use.  So that’s what I did.

First the shortbread crust gets made and pressed into the pan.  This is really just flour, powdered sugar, and butter, but somehow it works:

Bake that for ~20 minutes and you get your shortbread crust.

On top of that, put the custard mixture (eggs, lemon, sugar, etc.)

Bake that for another 15 -18 minutes, then let cool and dust with powdered sugar!  Voila.  Lemon bars.  These are insanely good.  Like, so good that we had friends over on Friday night and didn’t eat any until they got there and the next morning there was only one left.  Om nom nom.

Unfortunately we still had a bunch of lemons after that.  So I did what people everywhere do when life hands them lemons:

Meyer Lemon Bar recipe here.

Like a Rolling Scone

I got up this morning with every intention of tackling the mess that is currently our basement, especially with my seeds coming soon!  I want to get the table I’ll be using for seed starts all ready to go.  Instead, however, I decided to make pizza dough and try out a new blueberry lemon scone recipe since I had both blueberries and meyer lemons sitting around needing to be used.

Posts on the pizza and the basement will come later, but I thought I’d share the scone recipe since I’ve already eaten two of them.  Oops.

I did some searching around and ended up mashing a couple of different scone recipes together to suit my needs.  Here’s what I ended up with:

Glazed Blueberry & Meyer Lemon Scones (adapted from Tyler Florence)

Ingredients

Blueberry Scones:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup sugar
• Zest from two lemons
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, cut in chunks
• 1 cup fresh blueberries
• 1 cup heavy cream, plus more for brushing the scones
• 1 egg yolk, slightly beaten
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Lemon Glaze:

• Juice from one lemon
• 1 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted
• 2 tablespoons heavy cream
• Zest from one lemon

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Sift together the dry ingredients; the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Add the lemon zest and mix.

Using 2 forks, a pastry blender, or your hands, cut in the butter to coat the pieces with the flour. The mixture should look like coarse crumbs. Add the egg yolk and vanilla extract to the cream.  Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the cream mixture. Fold everything together just to incorporate; do not overwork the dough.  Mix in the blueberries, taking care not to mash them (unless you want purple scones!).

Press the dough out on a lightly floured surface into a flat circle, approximately 8 inches in diameter.  Cut the circle into 8 even wedges.  Place the scones on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and brush the tops with a little heavy cream.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes until beautiful and brown.

While the scones are baking, make the glaze by mixing all the ingredients together in a bowl.  Let the scones cool a bit before you apply the glaze or it will be runny.  I highly recommend doing this over a plate, as well, so that you don’t get glaze everywhere.

Enjoy!