British · Dessert
Lemon Posset with Shortbread Fingers
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, richness that coats and comforts, on a slow, honest burn.
Ingredients
- 600 ml double cream, 48 percent fat
- 150 g caster sugar
- zest of 2 unwaxed lemons
- 90 ml lemon juice, strained
- 125 g plain flour
- 40 g rice flour
- 110 g unsalted butter, cold and cubed
- 55 g caster sugar, for the shortbread
- 1 g fine salt
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Salted water & the float testStraining & passing through a sieveRubbing fat into flour
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Bring the cream, 150 g sugar and the zest to a rolling boil and hold it there for 3 minutes, stirring, so it thickens slightly. 3 min
- Take the pan off the heat, stir in the lemon juice, stand 10 minutes, then strain into six glasses and chill 4 hours until set. 10 min
- Rub the cold butter into both flours, the 55 g sugar and the salt to fine crumbs, press firmly into a 20 cm tin and mark into fingers.
- Bake the shortbread at 150C (300F) for 35 minutes to 40 minutes until an even pale sand colour, cut through the marks while hot and cool it in the tin. 35 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rubbing fat into flour 47 recipes
- The fat is cold when it starts and still firm when the rubbing stops, and the bowl has not warmed under the hands.
- Stopped early, while it still looks like coarse crumbs with pieces of fat visible in it, not worked on to a smooth even sand, which means the pieces have gone.
- Nothing is greasy or glossy and nothing has smeared into a paste against the side of the bowl.
- Liquid added last and only enough to bring it together: pressed, it just holds, with no wet patch and nothing sticking to the hand.
- Rested cold before it is rolled or shaped, so the gluten relaxes and the fat firms again after being handled.
Where it goes wrong The fat was too warm, or it was rubbed until the mixture looked uniform. Once the fat has melted into the flour there are no solid pieces left to steam apart in the oven, so the bake is sandy or tough instead of flaky, and nothing done later puts those layers back.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Moscato d’Asti
- Also Right
- Late-harvest Riesling
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling elderflower
Citrus desserts need a wine sweeter than they are, with acid enough to keep up: light, frothy, and low-proof wins.
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