Lemon curd failure

After my complaints that the December Delicious was lame (see post here) I decided I would make some lemon curd butterfly cupcakes.  I remembered that Curtis had a lemon curd tart recipe, so I thought that I would just use the lemon curd part.

G and I followed the simple recipe - the recipe is easy but you need at least 3 hands to do it all and then I put it in the fridge overnight, but in the morning it was still runny - delicious, but runny.

I figured I could still make it work in the cakes, but I am not thrilled.  So I put it in the freezer and it firmed up, but did not freeze.  It held its shape for a few minutes but as it melted it soaked into the cakes - not a bad thing I guess!

You can see how there is only a little of the curd visible, but I filled the entire 'bowl' in the cake with the curd!

Recipes fail.  That's part of life.  However, usually my failures relate to things I just 'throw together', rather than supposedly tested recipes in magazines and books. 

I think the problem with this recipe was that it contained words that were open to interpretation such as 'until thick'.  What precisely is thick?  More helpful is a recipe that talks about stiff peaks, or the sauce coating the back of the a spoon, or forming ribbons on top of the sauce that will hold their shape.  I can handle recipes that don't prescribe precise amounts of ingredients (often biscuit recipes) as the baker needs to add enough water to just bring the dough together - a judgment I feel comfortable making.

My criticism is not that the recipe was a failure, but that it was written poorly, and in a way that left it up to me to guess when it was done!