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A very lovely coworker surprised me a few days ago with a gigantic bag of meyer lemons from a family tree in Napa. I sent about 1/3rd of them to my mom, used several in smoothies (which are not so blog worthy and are certainly very ugly looking with all the chard and other hippie hoo-da I’ve been drinking up, thus, the blog has been rather neglected lately for my newfound need to eat more vegetables in very boring forms), and the rest are either in these lemon bars or waiting to be devoured in the coming days.
This recipe is only slightly modified from David Lebovitz’s Whole Lemon Bars recipe, with my notes and adjustments below. My favorite frequent visitor to Paris (who has on several occasions rubbed shoulders with Mr. Labovitz at certain company events!)Â is coming for dinner Sunday and I imagine I’ll find some new, delightful way to use the lemons in our meal. You, reader, can look forward to that!
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I did make these by weight and recommend you do the same if possible.
Crust
1 C flour (140g)
1/4 C sugar (50g)
1 stick butter, melted (113-115g)
1/2 tsp vanilla
Topping
2.5 small organic meyer lemons
3/4 C sugar (150g)
3 large eggs
4 tsp corn starch
1/4 tsp salt
3 T melted butter (45g)
Powdered sugar for top
Oven to 350–line a 8×8 inch pan in foil as smoothly as possible, matte side of the foil touching the bars/filling. Get the foil crisply into the corners.
Mix the flour, 1/4C sugar, 1/4 tsp salt, stick melted butter and vanilla until just smoothly combined. Distribute the dough into the bottom of the pan evenly using hands or a spatula. Bake for 25 minutes until golden brown.
While crust is cooking, cut lemons in half and remove seeds. In a blender (I used my wonderful vitamix, but if you have a regular blender you may want to chop the lemons a bit), pulverize two lemons and the juice of 1/2 a lemon with the sugar until mostly smooth, a few chunks are good. Add the eggs, corn starch, salt and the rest of the butter, blending until smooth.
Pour the lemon topping onto the crust when it’s done cooking, reduce the heat to 300 and return the dish to the oven for 25 more minutes, or until it stops jiggling and is set.
Remove from oven, let it cool COMPLETELY before messing with it, then cut with a very heavy sharp knife into squares! Consider topping with powdered sugar and serving with tea.
I recommend NOT leaving these in an air-tight container as I foudn it to make them go very soggy very quickly. Foil wrapped in bunches works much better, at least in SF climate!