A friend of mine is going away for some months on business, so naturally this calls for a party. As a special favor, his fiance asked me to make lemon bars.
(Now, I <heart> baking, and had offered to make anything she wanted for the party. )
So of course, she picks my Kryptonite. No lemon bars I have made set up properly. They tend to be less custardy and more…lemon shortbread soup. I have tried recipes that went so far awry as to invert themselves in the oven! But…her fiance is going to Canada - right after she moved here to be with him, and she requested them specially.
I can’t let her down!
Help, fellow dopers! I found two recipes on epicurious that look good. One is simple, the other is more complicated, but that’s because it seems to be specifically tailored to eliminate the soupy topping problem. Then again, I’m shy of trying the more complicated one since I have not had luck with lemon bars in the past. Which would y’all attempt?
I have never made lemon bars myself (or if I did, I made them from a box) but #2 looks more promising. The writer specifically addresses the soupy curd problem and the reviews look good.
The newer copy of Joy of Cooking has a lemon bar recipe that has always come out beautifully for me. You may need to bake it for longer than the recipe calls for, but as long as the crust isn’t burning, it’s all good. It’s extraordinarily lemony.
Here’s my take on that recipe; the ingredients are the same, but the directions are in my own hand.
Ingredients
1 ½ cups white flour
¼ cup powdered sugar
12 tablespoons cold butter, cut into pieces
Preheat the oven to 325.
Stir the flour and sugar together, then cut in the butter until the mixture will stick together. Press it into a greased 13x9” baking pan; you’ll want to make a pretty high rim around the edges, so that the lemon curd added during the second step doesn’t leak out. Bake for 20-30 minutes until golden brown; set aside to cool.
Reduce the oven to 300.
6 large eggs
3 cups sugar
grated zest of one lemon
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (about 5 lemons)
½ cup white flour
Stir eggs and sugar together; add zest and lemon juice. Sift the flour over top, and stir in until well-blended. Pour over the baked crust, and bake until the middle is set, about 35 minutes. Cool completely before cutting.
Note: When cutting gooey things like this, you can make it much easier by putting a towel under hot running water and then wringing it out; in between cuts, wipe the knife in the hot towel.
I use the recipe on the back of the bag of sugar (not sure what brand)
It is closer to #2 (bake the crust first, then add lemon)
I’ll jot down the recipe when I’m home.
Really do let it bake as long as it needs to in order to set. If I recall correctly, the baking times are way underestimated (I forget if I increased them in this recipe). Unless the bars are burning, you’ve got nothing to worry about; and their jiggle should be slight, not severe, when you take them out of the oven. My guess is that underbaking is responsible for some of the previous failures.
The easiest mistake to make with these bars, at least for me, is to forget to sprinkle the flour into the lemon mixture. I dunno, it just feels like you’re done once you’ve got the eggs and sugar and lemons in there. But the flour is what makes them set. Don’t forget! Double-check!
If you’re paranoid about the lemony goodness leaking out of the crust, you can always line the pan with aluminum foil before greasing it. This can be difficult later on (you might have to pick pieces of aluminum out of the individual bars), but at least you guarantee you’ll be able to get them out of the pan.
I haven’t done it, but I can guarantee you this’d work better with parchment paper. Nonstick and won’t tear into little shreds on your food.
I used to line everything with aluminum foil. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I switched to parchment paper a year ago and have not had one failure.
Can you line the sides and bottom of a brownie pan with a single sheet of parchment? I’ve used it before to line the bottoms of cake pans, but I never thought of using it around interior corners; it seems to me as if it’d bunch up in the corner of a pan if you tried to use it like that.
Easy way: use two sheets of parchment paper. Lay the first on in the pan, cut to the width of the pan. It should lie down one side, across the bottom and up the opposite side. Use a second sheet of paper at rotated 90 degrees: cut to the length of the pan, down the side, accross the bottom, and up the forth side. There may be a teensy bare slice at each corner, but it doesn’t matter. Here’s a picture of a loaf pan to illustrate.
The other way you can do it is with one sheet of paper and a cut slit in each corner. Then just fold and crease to fit smoothly. This uses less paper, but is harder to get smooth. It’s also harder to describe, but a few minutes with paper and pan will illuminate the possibilities.
Well, the point of using a liner in this case is so that if the lemon curd leaks, it won’t be able to get between the bars and the pan and form a glue that sticks the bars to the pan. That means that the liner essentially has to form a waterproof “cup” that will contain the entire bar, so it can be lifted out of the pan and then worked with. If there are slits, or gaps between two sheets of parchment, at the corners of the pan, then it won’t form the necessary barrier. And if the liquid doesn’t leak, lemon bars are ridiculously easy to cut free from the pan, so a liner is unnecessary.
2 cups flour
2/3 cup powdered sugar
1 cup butter, softened
4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
combine 2 cups flour, 2/3 cup powdered sugar and butter. Beat on low speed until crumbly. Press in ungreased 13x9 inch pan
Bake at 350 deg F oven for 18-20 min until light brown
Beat eggs, granulated sugar, remaining flour, baking powder. and lemon juice untill well mixed. Pour over hot crust. bake 20 min longer or until filling is set
Ah, my bad. I thought there was a crust which would prevent the lemon curd running too far. Shows what I know. I should actually make the things before I open my yap.
I take my leftovers to the office and foist them off on my co-workers.
Today I passed around pieces of a cheesecake I made a couple of days ago. It was amazingly delicious: I used the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for Lemon Cheesecake, except I swapped in mango for the lemon and changed out one of the packages of cream cheese for a small container of plain yogurt (wrapped in cheesecloth and drained overnight). It was utterly heavenly.
If you can find the Best Recipe Book put out by the Cook’s Illustrated people, every single recipe I’ve tried from there is completely foolproof. In my edition, the lemon bar recipe is on page 816. I haven’t made it myself but I’ve learned to trust basically everything in the book.
This is the recipe from the “Better Homes and Gardens” cookbook. My husband makes it and everyone raves about it.
Lemon Bars
Ingredients:
1/3 cup margarine or butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 eggs
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons finely shredded lemon peel
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
Powdered sugar (optional – but they are SO good with it!)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat margarine with an electric mixer on medium to high speed for 30 seconds. Add 1/4 cup of the sugar. Beat until combined. Beat in the 1 cup of flour until crumbly. Press into the bottom of an ungreased 8x8x2-inch baking pan. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 15 to 18 minutes or just until golden.
Meanwhile, combine eggs, the remaining sugar, the 2 tablespoons flour, lemon peel, juice, and baking powder. Beat for 2 minutes or until thoroughly combined. Pour over hot baked layer.
Bake in a 350 degree oven about 20 minutes more or until lightly browned around the edges and center is set. Cool on a wire rack. If desired, sift powdered sugar over top. Cut into bars. Makes 20.
My husband uses a glass pan to make lemon bars and I don’t recall him having a sticking problem with them. However, I’ve always had great luck with parchment paper keeping things from sticking.
