No Half Measures

30 Apr 2022

My wonderful aunt and uncle live in California, and in the dreariest part of the year sometimes a box of citrus appears to brighten my day!

This box contained 10 key limes, 5 meyer lemons, and a handful of navel oranges! The oranges we simply eat straight, and they taste like sunshine. But for the lemons and limes I wanted to come up with something special!

I processed the lemons and limes, zesting and juicing them. Ironically the 10 limes gave up nearly twice as much juice as the 5 lemons!

I’d already had a few ideas kicking around, but seeing the amount of juice and zest available let me commit! Ideally I would make things that could easily be frozen, because that way I can enjoy them for longer and also they’ll be useful here in a few months when I won’t have any time to bake but will enjoy having delicious citrus treats at the ready! I decided to make one of my all-time favorite desserts, lemon bars, which would use up nearly all of the 2/3 cup of lemon juice.

For the limes, I really only got 6 tsp of zest, but nearly 2 cups of juice! Right away I wanted key lime pie, but portable - enter key lime pie bars! In the same theme, I decided to try out key lime pie balls as well. The mixture was slightly more wet than I liked, so I ended up adding more vanilla wafers, 1/4 cup pecans, 1/4 cup nutritional yeast and 1/4 cup ground flax to the mixture before combining and scooping them out onto the tray.

The recipe says to refrigerate and then roll in powdered sugar, but I’m going to go straight to freezing for storage.

To use some of the lemon zest - although I had to use the lime juice since I had so much more - I made lemon muffins.

Here we are! With only a little lime juice left over, there’s now four kinds of citrus treat waiting for me in my freezer!