Lemon Posset

There is nothing more boring than a blog post that starts "Sorry you haven't heard from me for a while, it's all just been so busy...."

It's as boring as settling down to read someone's diary and the entries go:

"2nd Feb...
... Dear Diary, gosh it's been so long since my last entry!...."

"5th July...
... Dear Diary, gosh it's been so long  since my last entry!....."

So I won't start this blog post like that. And anyway, I'm not sorry. It's a miracle I update Recipe Rifle at all, what with my chronic heartburn and never making a penny out of it and being totally and utterly fed up with both cooking and writing.

If you are looking for some sort of explanation then it's because at first I couldn't think of anything to say. All I could think was how annoying Kitty was being, but that was what the last post was about. And then whenever I was about to sit down and do something, awful things would happen. Like Kitty got really ill. And I mean REALLY ill this time, a temperature of 104 and terrible eczema all over her and I had to see about a million different doctors and urgh, I feel quite ill myself thinking about it. AND my husband was away in America and the whole thing was so stressful I was sent running into the arms of a strip of Valium I nicked off my Dad. It was really Seventies.

And then we went on holiday for a bit, which was lovely but I wasn't going to blog from THERE. And now my husband's in trouble again for saying something or other on Twitter, which I won't go into because it's too dementing.

Anyway I am as I write this waiting for him to finish off some work before we go out for a Chinese to drown our sorrows in spring rolls and neon orange sauce, and I'm pacing about and worrying about him and feeling sad that it's all gone bonkers (again) and vaguely wondering if he can ever be persuaded not to say just exactly precisely whatever's in his brain .... and I realised with shock that Recipe Rifle is now an entire month out of date and as it so happens I've got something to say about lemon posset.

I don't like lemon puddings - at all. I've said it before. The acid of the lemon combined with the sweetness and sugariness of other ingredients reminds me powerfully of vomit. But there's something different about lemon posset, maybe it's the really serious creaminess of the thing.

We had this at my sister's house in Oxford over the weekend, made by a terrific fellow called Rory Dorman. Ah yes, the weekend, back when life was still nice and Twitter hadn't fallen on our heads. It seems a golden time, the one sunny day we've had for ages. Maybe the memory of it and the deliciousness of the posset will change my mind about lemon puddings for ever. But I suspect not.

Lemon Posset by Rory Dorman
For about 6 or 8

500ml double cream
lemon and zest of 2 lemons
100g sugar

1 Bubble the cream in a pan gently for 3 minutes

2 Add the sugar and your lemony stuff and whisk

3 Pour into ramekins or glasses and chill for 3 hours

We had ours with raspberry coulis and little posh french biscuits and it was delicious.