Lemon Bars

My final guest post (for now) comes from Pam, and looks like the perfect treat for a Tuesday tea-break!

I love lemons. The sharp sweetness and tangy bite they give is just like nectar to me. So when I offered to make, bake and blog a recipe for your site I knew it had to include one of my favourite ingredients! I decided to make some lemon bars I'd had my eye on trying for a while... 

The recipe I followed is from The Food Network website and was enough to feed the 5,000, so I adjusted the measurements down by half. This was an experiment after all...

Lemon Bars

Tasty little biscuits

Ingredients

I love lemons!

For the crust:

vegetable oil, for greasing the pan

3oz unsalted butter, diced

8oz plain flour

1oz light brown sugar

2oz icing sugar, plus a little extra for dusting

pinch of salt

For the filling:

2 large eggs, plus 1 egg yolk

8oz caster sugar

2oz plain flour, sifted

1 tsp grated lemon zest

Freshly squeezed lemon juice

freshly squeezed lemon juice, from about 2 lemons*

(*since I'm a bit of a "freestyler" when it comes to cooking/baking, I tend to adjust things in my own way! I added the juice of 3 lemons in my recipe (the original stated 8 lemons!), but I think I would cut it down to 2 lemons next time).

Directions

Pre-heat the oven to 175°C. Grease a baking tray lightly with the oil.

Make the crust:

- Pulse the butter, flour, both sugars and salt in a food processor* until the dough comes together. *I don't have a food processor, so had to do this by hand! Not particularly easy but I added a couple tiny drops of water to the mixture to help bring the dough together.

My "lovingly mis-shapen" pastry!

- Press evenly into the bottom of the prepared pan, making sure there are no cracks. Bake until the crust is golden, about 25 mins.

Meanwhile, make the filling:
- Whisk the whole eggs and yolks, sugar and flour in a bowl until smooth.
- Whisk in the lemon zest and juice 
- Remove the crust from the oven and turn the temperature down to 150°C.

Too much lemon juice made the filling
a little runny

- Pour the filling over the warm crust and return to the oven.
- Bake until the filling is just set, 30-35 minutes.
- Once baked I took it out of the oven and let it cool, before cutting into slices and dusting with icing sugar.

I have to say, my lemon bars turned out more like lemon biscuits - but the end result had that sharp lemony edge I love, with a deliciously sweet biscuit base so it was a winner all round for me. Definitely one to try again!

Thanks very much Pam! These look delicious and I love lemony things, (lemon drizzle is one of my favourite cakes), so I will definitely be giving these ago! Pam is a fellow blogger, check out her blog here.