When life hands you lemons

For my birthday, the Sergeant gave me a jumbo bag of Meyer lemons. I wanted them for their juice – I freeze it in ice cube trays, then put the cubes in bags to use throughout the year.

This year I decided to try my hand at candying the peels. I messed around with the different variables, looking at recipes from both Jen and Diane and Todd.

You can go with pithy slices of peel (above) or with skin alone (below). Then there's blanching to get rid of the bitterness of the pith. You definitely need to do that, even with the non-pithy peels. Another variable is the sugar:water ratio – 2:1 was Goldilocks' pick.

In the end, the thicker slices shown above had to be dried out in the oven a little so they would not be so gummy. I dipped them in a melted bar of Dagoba "Rich Dark." Very tasty!

The real winner, though, was the candied peels of pure lemon skin, without pith. They all got eaten before I could do a glamor shot with them, so you get a picture of them on the drying rack. They curled up a lot in the cooking process.

I didn't put chocolate on them because that would've been gilding the lily.