How to Make Lemon Sugar (Spoiler: It’s Easy!)

This easy, peasy lemon sugar recipe is a sweet way to add a little extra flavor to baked goods. With two ingredients, it’s a snap to make!

This orange sugar is another delicious way to use an abundance of citrus fruit.

Tasty Lemon Sugar

You’ll need just two ingredients, a small mixing bowl, and an airtight container in which to store the finished product. 

The flavor-infused sugar offers a sweet tart burst of goodness that will take an already-delicious recipe up to the next level. It’s a great way to preserve some fresh lemon flavor for use in the kitchen. 

Ingredients

Sugar — Use granulated sugar for this recipe. Regular white sugar works, but if you’ll be using this for sprinkling on baked goods, a slightly coarser sugar with larger crystals will give a bit more crunch. I prefer to use an organic sugar.

Lemon zest — Zest is the colored part of citrus peels. You’ll want to use just the zest, not the white part inside the skin, which can be bitter. I use a microplane to create fine shreds, but there are other ways to zest a lemon, depending on what kind of tools you have available. You can use any variety of lemon, even everyone’s favorite Meyer lemon, to impart a delicious citrus flavor. 

Making it

I’ve seen a lot of recipes for lemon sugar that call for drying the zest of a lemon on a baking sheet before mixing it with the sugar. I don’t think that step is necessary (says the Queen of Shortcuts). This is so ridiculously easy, there’s no benefit to making it more difficult!

You’ll want to remove the zest from a whole lemon first. Once the lemon is zested, you’ll be able to use the flesh and fresh lemon juice as you’d like, for eating or making lemon juice or homemade lemonade. 

Combine the sugar and zest in a small or medium bowl. Use a fork to thoroughly combine the ingredients. You could also use a food processor to do this, if you want the lemon pieces to be really fine, but it’s not necessary.

This citrus sugar will absorb the lemon oil from the lemon peel, which adds a bit of moisture to the mix. Once it sits, the sugar becomes a bit…crisp. This is to be expected and actually gives a nice crunch when used to top baked goods. 

Storing it

Transfer the sugar mixture to an air-tight container immediately and store it at room temperature for using in a variety of delicious recipes. 

This would make a lovely little hostess gift alone for a lemon lover, or paired with other flavored sugars like orange, lime, or lavender. 

Using Infused Lemon Sugar

This sweet sprinkle is perfect for adding to lemon desserts or using when you bake cookies, but it also adds a nice flavor to recipes that are not solely lemon flavored. 

• Use it as a sprinkle when baking this lemon blueberry loaf cake
• Sprinkle it on buttered toast
• Press some into cutout sugar cookies or roll dough balls in the lemon sugar mixture before you bake them
• Use it in place of regular sugar to sweeten tea
• Sprinkle it onto lemon bars
• Use it as part (or all) of the sugar in your favorite baked goods
• Wet the rim of a glass and dip it in lemon sugar for serving lemonade

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