Ah, Lemon Pigs, I've spent way too much time thinking about making you and feeling red hot guilt pangs because I never have time and I never buy lemons. This is the first Saturday in a long time that I have neither plans nor a hangover you could batter down walls with so it's time to stick some pins into some lemons!
This recipe popped up in the Citrus Fruits edition of Craddock Cookery, something to amuse the chizzlers with as you spend an entire week boiling oranges, playing with your new Canelle Knife and making stupidly complicated decorative centre pieces that look like oranges dancing round a May Pole. (I sneer but if it didn't require buying said 'Canelle Knife' to make the May Pole ribbons I'd be all over this)
To start out with you need a Lemon, a glace cherry (evil things), 3 pins & 4 'spent matches' trimmed of their burnt ends. Because I am an unabashed wastrel, who was able to buy 6 boxes of matches in Tesco for about €1.16 and probably isn't as worried as Fanny Craddock was about waking up one night and not having a match to light my bedside candle, I will be using unspent matches.
It was here that, in my slightly hungover state, I made my first mistake and cut off way too much of the pointy end of the lemon. This will be a very flat faced piggy indeed. Then came many minutes of trying to curl a '1/10 of an inch wide strio of lemon peel round into a spiral' and pin it into place. Whoever it was made the original lemon pigs had an awful lot more patience than I do and fingers that aren't useless fat sausages. My piggy ended up with a bit of a fail-tail. I do like the look of it for cocktail garnishes though! If you were super careful not to swallow back the pin
Once you have the tip of the snout off you use it to make 2 itsy bitsy pig ears. Which you are then supposed to insert into slits on his head. This is im-bloody-possible. You can't poke delicate bits of lemon peel into slits on lemons, they break, they refuse to stay in place and fall off, they generally make you feel like the most clumsy handed sausage-finger out there. I nearly gave up & threw lemon out window at this bit
Afterwards comes a flurry of sticking in little pin eyes, mashing on a 'sliver' of glace cherry mouth and poking in legs 'north, south, east & west' of his little pig's belly. Then you step back admire your work. Which in my case was a bit of a Frankenpiggy. I dunno will I be rushing out to make these for all of my friends
Unfortunately for my piggy I wasn't feeling up to making the slightly-too-real looking trough of pig swill in the picture, the ould tummy isn't up for putting together moist, brown food first thing in the morning.
Should really have just made the effort & popped into Hickeys for some black pins. Red eyes + big sticky red smile + pig = Amityville = not being able to sleep tonight if this fella is still in my flat. If his belly wasn't full of match head he'd be ending tonight in a Gin & Tonic. (I have a feeling that's where Fanny's original piggy ended up, she was very specific about cutting all the burnt bits off your matches before using them, mmmm Gin & Piggy)
Next up: Banana Delights
