Mini lemon souffles: Summer in the middle of winter

My friend and I made deliciously tart lemon souffles, I took a bunch of pictures, and I'll share the recipe with you, but first I have to tell you this story: I've been tracking my social media with Klout, a tool that looks at your influence the world of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs, etc. (Speaking of which, don't forget to follow me on Twitter!) It also measures how much influence you have over a particular topic. According to Klout, I'm influential over the topic of Minnesota.

Guys. I've never even mentioned Minnesota. I love when tools like this turn up such wacky results! For what it's worth, the blog tool tracks what search keys people used to find your blog. The top results are for "scherenschnitte," which makes sense, and "you pull it out," which I don't understand at all. I love search engine analytics!

Anyway. Enough about nerd stuff, let's get on to the baking!

I found this recipe for mini lemon souffles baked in lemon rinds on Martha Stewart's website and wanted them immediately. The recipe was first published in 1998, when I was in elementary school and couldn't separate an egg. Twelve years later, the recipe has held up brilliantly. My friend has a lemon tree (and therefore more lemons than she knows what to do with), so she brought some over and we pretended we were fancy with our souffles.

The original recipe asks for you to remove the inside of the lemons with a grapefruit spoon or a melon baller. Sadly, we didn't have either of these things, so we used spoons to scrape the lemon pulp.

We couldn't punch through the bottom layer of the lemon. The bottom of the lemon is sliced off to let it sit stably on the cookie sheet, but we were afraid that without the skin to hold the souffle batter in, it would spread all over the cookie sheet, so we placed the hollowed-out lemons in a muffin tin.

The first start of the actual souffle part is to whisk lemon juice, egg yolks, sugar, and flour.

We whisked this together, then held it over a pot of simmering water to thicken it. We stirred constantly, then pulled it off the heat and continued to stir until it was cooler. (In the background of the picture below, we've got homemade pizza. Yum!)

 

We set this mixture aside, then used the same technique and heated egg whites and sugar until the sugar melted, then we used an electric mixer to beat the mix until we could pull the egg whites up and soft peaks would remain after.

I tried using a hand whisk at first. Please, do not make the same mistake I did. Go straight to the electric mixer!

We mixed about a third of the egg whites in with the egg yolks, using a whisk to stir them until they were combined.

When these were combined, we slowly folded the rest of the egg whites in with the egg yolk mix. The secret here is to go slowly: You don't want to crush the egg whites (they're what make the souffle so poofy), so you need to make a circle with a spatula around the bowl, cutting the two together without crushing the egg whites.

We alternately spooned the mix into the hollowed-out lemons and cleaned the bowl out with our fingers, then licked our fingers clean. We had smaller lemons than the recipe called for, so the souffle spiled over the edge of the lemon rind, which was fine.

This picture is so very washed out. Awesome.

Side note: We filled the empty cups with water so the lemons wouldn't cook unevenly. This is important to do whenever there are empty cups in whatever you're baking in a muffin tin.

When the souffle tops were ever-so-slightly browned, we pulled the souffles out. The souffle puffed up quite a bit and spilled over the rind.

We pulled them out with tongs, placed them on plates, sprinkled them with powdered sugar, and tried to savor them — but we devoured them instead.

The souffle itself is light and fluffy, and gets scrumptiously tart when you spoon it out from the rind. I love these little babies — they're definitely going on the menu for summer, and they were a great reminder of sunshine in the middle of a winter rainstorm. You're going to love them.

Mini lemon souffles

Ingredients:

8 large lemons

3 eggs, separated

0.5 cups sugar

2 tablespoons flour

Powdered sugar, for topping

To make:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Trim "bottom" end from lemons so they sit flat on their own. Cut the "top" or stem end about a third of the way down.

3. Scoop out the pulp and squeeze the juice out. Put the shells in a muffin tin or on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

4. Mix the egg yolks, 0.25 cups of granulated sugar, 0.25 cups of the lemon juice you squeezed earlier, and the flour in a heat-proof bowl. Whisk until the mixture is pale yellow.

5. Hold the bowl over simmering water, whisking constantly for about 8 minutes. When it's thickened, remove the bowl and continue to mix until it cools. Set aside.

6. Mix egg whites and remaining 0.25 cups of sugar in another bowl, and hold it over the simmering water until the sugar has melted.

7. Beat egg whites with an electric mixer, first on a low speed until they're frothy, then on increasingly higher speed until the meringue is shiny and pulling the beater out leaves soft peaks. Don't overbeat!

8. Whisk about a third of the meringue/egg whites into the egg yolks and lemon.

9. Fold the rest of the egg whites into the yolk mixture very gently.

10. Spoon the souffle into the hollowed out lemon rinds, and bake the souffles for about 14 minutes.

11. Transfer souffles onto plates, sprinkle with confectioners' sugar, and serve immediately.