Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Lemon squares
Recipe from the old gf, who used to make these back in high school, and who no doubt still makes a mean lemon square.
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup butter, softened*
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons grated lemon peel
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix flour, butter and powdered sugar. Press in ungreased square pan, 8x8x2 or 9x9x2 inches, building up 1/2 inch edges. Bake 20 minutes. Beat remaining ingredients about 3 minutes or until light and fluffy. Pour over hot crust.
Bake about 25 minutes or until no indentation remains when touched lightly in center; cool. Sprinkle with powdered sugar if desired.
When I made these tonight, I cut the amount of lemon peel in half but kept everything else the same. My crowd doesn’t like things that are too lemony (Jake especially).
If you’re used to making these with Crisco, you need to try the butter version. The crust is essentially short bread, and there’s plenty of custardy lemon curd on top. This is one of those desserts that I could easily nibble into extinction, so I have to force myself to cover it and stick it in the fridge. It’s that good.
It occurs to me that there’s no reason why this could not be adapted to any citrus fruit. The more interesting question is whether it would work for a strongly flavored berry, like raspberries. Would it be as good sans rind? I’ll have to try it some time, and I’ll report back to you.
D.
*One of the advantages of Bakersfield is that I can soften butter, proof yeast, and get my bread to rise in our rather poorly insulated garage.
bleck. for some reason, i just do not like citrus-flavored desserts, unless they involve chocolate. like, chocolate-orange bars/cookies are awesome, but those little lemon shortbread cookies? ick. i can’t even imagine liking a lemon bar.
just one of my many oddities…
Different strokes, my dear. You like vegetarian food, for example 🙂
This sound interesting. We have lemon trees I can pull from.
Let us know if you try Lime Bars. Or one could mix and do a Lemon/Lime bar. Would be pretty to have the green and yellow zest in the custard.