My favorite Lemon Cream !!

There's this recipe from our French Pastry School text book that teaches us how to make the best lemon cream for a filling on a tart or inside a cake, or for your cream puff filling. The possibility of usage for this lemon cream is endless! And I LOVE a good lemony dessert.

Before when I made any sort of lemon tart or lemon filling for a cake, I never would have thought about adding butter to the lemon curd to make it a lemon cream. This is just SO French, adding butter to everything that they get their hands on. Being Taiwanese, (Chinese) we tend to stay away from butter, we think it is very unhealthy to the heart so maybe that's why butter never popped up in my mind to add it to my lemon curd. However, it's ironic, because Asian food are known for it's hot oil flash fry or deep fried foods, and here we are saying No to butter? HA!

So here we have your basic lemon curd ingredients and with the addition of butter to make it a lemon cream. Notice the container of butter? That's A LOT of butter to be emulsifying into your curd. Delicious!
You would go about making your lemon curd by adding sugar to your eggs and lemon juice and then combining the two mixture together then zest your lemon rind into the mix. Then over a hot
water bath, you would cook the mixture to 85degree C to pasteurize your eggs. This is important to do so, if you don't hit 85C, you will run the risk bacteria growth and someone may get seriously ill from food poisoning!

With a digital thermometer measuring the lemon curd that's being cooked over a hot water bath. It's important to keep on whisking as the curd cooks, or else the eggs will end up cooking at the bottom and you will end up getting scrambled lemon eggs. Not very pleasant to eat at all! Keep that whisk going!

When it's time, you add the butter into your curd and by using a hand blender, you will need to emulsify the butter into your curd. This will give you a real smooth, creamy and thick texture that is packed with richness and flavor! I am in love.

Lemon Cream Tart with French Meringue!