Lemon bars: part one

I made some lemon bars a few days ago. (and then I ate all of them, there aren’t any left now.)

I’m fasting today while I wait to get my cholesterol tested and writing about this is making me so hungry. torture!

Anyway, I used Betty Crocker’s classic recipe

She rarely lets me down. This was almost one of those times.

Lemon Squares

Ingredients

•  1 cup of flour
• 1/2  c butter, softened (one stick)
• 1/4 c powdered sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 c sugar
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 2 tsp lemon peel
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt

the eggs at the farmer’s market are so pretty
farmer’s market, oh how i have missed you

Heat oven to 350 right away. Then mix butter, flour and powdered sugar (weird right?) together. It will be a very soft dough. Press it into the bottom of an ungreased 8x8x2 or 9x9x2 pan. Bake it for about 20 minutes, until it starts to be a little bit golden brown. Mine turned out extremely flaky, maybe too much so. (If anyone has fixes for that… let me know)

Meanwhile, make the lemon curd. Beat the remaining ingredients for about three minutes, until they are light and fluffy. I probably did not do this for long enough.

probably because I tried to do it by hand

I also added extra lemon juice. Pour over the hot crust and bake for another 25 minutes, at which point there will be “no indentation if touched light in the center” (thanks betty c!)

let it cool. I highly recommend freezing these, since they are exponentially better.

VERDICT: okay but disappointing

Me, excited for lemon bars. how quickly that smile would fade. also i was making a thumbs up, you just can’t tell

They were just not as good as I remembered. And definitely not zingy enough. I thought about making a very tart frosting for them from powdered sugar and lemon juice (to taste) but I am not a fan of frosting on bar cookies (eg, frosted brownies and i are NOT FRIEND). So i let it be, and ate them anyway, since they were still quite tasty. They just weren’t what I wanted to bake.

Now, I am not a person who knows when to quit. So expect an update soon, entitled LEMON BARS: PART TWO, the LEMONING

okay sorry that was a REALLY bad joke

 

I’ve been lazy with photos recently, so today i am going to town

recipes for change

I have recently become unattached, i.e. single. It’s for the best, and I feel pretty good about it as a whole, but there were still a few difficult days.

Behold, my patened coping process

Okay this part is important: first wallow for a few days. watch lots of movies.

THEN one morning you will wake up and feel less bad. At that point decide to do some metaphorical ball-grabbing, so sit up and:

• Go on a cleaning spree. Do all that laundry, wash the dishes, mop the floors!
• Meet up with your girlfriends! MOST IMPORTANT and you know, branch out too. meet new people.
• Make upbeat playlist while riding the metro (and/or cry a little)
• Go shopping – by ridiculous, fun things
• Then, make brownies.

When I first started baking (I mean, seriously baking, not just making weird mint cupcakes when I was ten) the first thing I made was Betty Crocker’s Chocolate chip cookies. Then I flipped a little further in the book to her brownies.

The first ones I made were utterly terrible. They didn’t even have chocolate in them, just cocoa powder. However Betty included a second recipe a few pages later, and it is this recipe that I regularly turn to. None of the other recipes I try have come close to this one, but fair warning – it’s not for the faint of heart (or waist). But you know – sometimes you just need to suck it up and eat some brownies.

Unfortunately, I am not able to bake these from scratch… and normally I’m not a big fan of box mixes but as far as they go, Betty Crocker’s Deluxe brownies are pretty dang tasty.

I was going to give you my recipe for Much Better Brownies but I realized that like a fool, I left my recipe notebook at home. But I’ll post it another time. I know the method, but I’m a little shakey on the quantities and I don’t want to give anyone a faulty recipe.

post-script: just because you feel okay for a day doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be on your guard for sad feelings. They can still sneak up on you!

Yeah they did.