“Lemon curdled cream” does not sound appealing, but it’s the most accurate description for these Lemon Possets, a creamy, pudding-like dessert made with only three ingredients—lemon juice, heavy cream, and sugar.

The dessert dates back hundreds of year—Lady MacBeth used poisoned possets to incapacitate the guards outside Duncan’s room, but the dessert looked quite different back then. It wasn’t creamy or cold; the original posset was a hot, spiced drink made of milk curdled with wine or ale. (Watch Chris explain the history of the dessert here.)

Modern possets are curdled, but the curds are teeny tiny, so small you barely notice them. So put visions of lemon-flavored ricotta out of your mind. The texture here is closer to crème brûlée. (You could even sprinkle on some sugar and torch it if you wanted to.)

It’s not as simple as stirring lemon juice into cream, however. You have to get the stovetop (briefly) involved. Heating the cream (to at least 140℉) changes the way its proteins coagulate and gel. Without heat, you get a softer gel that only involves casein proteins—too soft to scoop with a spoon. Cream’s other set of proteins, the whey proteins, don’t do any thickening with acid alone.

Heating the cream causes the whey proteins to denature and stick to the casein proteins—then, when you add the acid, they help the casein proteins form a much stronger, bouncier, cross-linked gel network. Higher temperatures, over 176℉, denature some of the stickier whey proteins, which forms an even more robust, firmer gel—a bit too firm for our liking. Heat the cream until barely simmering around the edges, then add the hot lemon syrup. Divide the mixture between ramekins (or teacups) and chill until set.

But possets are just one step in my lemon mitigation plan. Baked good-wise, I’m a fool for our Amalfi Lemon Cake. It’s unassuming in both appearance and ingredients list, but the flavor is LOUD. As I’ve said previously, I didn’t appreciate just how much lemon went into the cake until I found myself zesting and juicing over 4 lemons at 8 p.m. on a Thursday evening. The zest perfumes the sugar that goes into the batter; the juice is used to make a syrup that is poured on the still-hot bundt shortly after it comes out of the oven. It is tender. It is bright. It is beyond fragrant. It is so moist it borders on juicy, yet never reads as sodden.

My dear friend and Milk Street compatriot, Allie, is similarly enamored with our Chocolate Olive Oil Cake (which contains over a 1/4 cup of lemon juice), while Willow a big fan of our Lemon-Raspberry Olive Oil Muffins.

But lemon has many applications beyond the sweet. It’s the key to the creamiest parmesan pasta sauce, this intensely flavored shrimp risotto, a very vibrant bowl of spaghetti. And of course, the importance of lemon in cocktails cannot be overstated. Try it in the Yayo—it really brings vermouth to life.

Check out our collection of Lemony Recipes.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.