those of you who have cooked with me, or had dinner with me on a friday night, know that i am generally incapable of making dinner in less than an hour. in fact, usually i choose whatever preparation is most involved. well, not “most involved” […]
ok, nothing fancy here – just wanted to share a few recipes with you. the first is a chocolate cake, like the one i use for everything (the stout cake), but for when you don’t have beer on hand. it’s much the same in consistency, […]
it’s the dead of the winter, and the gray skies have the happy consequence of making lemon taste like sunshine. there’s nothing like eating something that you know is definitely out of season, you know? and i don’t know about you, but i don’t feel guilty at all.
what i do feel guilty about is that while i usually am happy to give away scads of baked goods, these hit the spot so well that i am thinking about keeping them all for myself. how big a pan of them did i make, you ask? oh, a paltry jelly roll pan’s worth. and while i am actually using some of them in an experiment to see how they would fare frozen and thawed again (thus making it possible to eat them over a period of time…), there is no way that i really need to eat this many lemon bars. i just really, really want to.
the thing that is lovely about these lemon bars is that they have a thick enough shortbread crust that the bottom of it stays nicely crisp, while the middle gets imbued with moisture from the lemon custard. you get a nice gradient of soft to slightly soft to crisp, and it all tastes sharp, but not too sharp, because the mixture has a healthy dose of milk in it. the milk does double duty – it makes the custard creamier, and cuts the acidity of the lemons a bit, but not too much. also, these bars don’t have too much crust or too much filling, and the result is a very lemon-y, custardy, crispy confection that tastes divine out of the fridge.