Experimented with Moroccan-Style Preserved Lemon recipe and need help.

I found a recipe that bakes the lemon preserve instead of canning and thought I would experiment by throwing the recipe into a slow cooker. I used significantly less salt than called for but my ingredients include 4lbs lemons, cardamom, pepper, crushed red pepper, sugar, salt, coriander. All of my spices were scaled up proportionally to the amount of lemon but the result seems way too lemony /bitter for me to conceive of it being at all useful. Admittedly I've never tasted preserved lemons so I don't know if it's supposed to be like this or if I've ruined it by slow cooking. Any idea of what can I do to save it?

bon appetit