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Careless errors
By Ann | March 28, 2008
Do you ever make mistakes in the kitchen? I made one the other day while baking Elke Wood’s lemon squares (scroll down halfway) from the “cookies and candy” chapter of The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics.
You see, the recipe calls for 1 3/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour. As you probably know, lemon bars (or squares — whatever) are composed of a pastry crust on the bottom and a gooey lemon filling on top. I assumed that the entire 1 3/4 cups flour was for the crust and dumped it all into my food processor, whizzing it up with the butter, lemon zest, chopped almonds and powdered sugar. The recipe says the mixture should “just cling together,” which it did — barely. I smashed it into my buttered baking pan and pre-baked for 20 minutes.
With the crust in the oven, I turned my attention to the filling, a mix of sugar, eggs, lemon juice, baking powder and… 1/4 cup flour. That’s when I realized my error – I had misread the recipe, added too much flour to my pastry and that’s why the crust was so weirdly crumbly. Honestly, I blame bad recipe writing for my mistake — the ingredients for the crust and filling should have been separated. Because I’d even read (okay, scanned) the recipe before I started mixing and didn’t catch the subtle (but crucial) flour distinction.
Anyway, the real question is: How did they turn out? Well, the crust was extremely delicate, crumbly, very short and messy. Though it did manage to (mostly) cling together, it was an operation worthy of a plastic surgeon coaxing the squares out of the pan. I liked the crunch of the almonds in the crust. The lemon mixture was too sweet. Two cups of sugar is way too much. I’m wondering if, in the future, I could even cut the amount in half, but that would probably interfere with the chemistry of the filling, causing it not to set, or something like that. Oh, who am I kidding? I probably won’t make these lemon squares again.
Number of recipes left: 26
Topics: Cooking the Books |
One Response to “Careless errors”
Comments
« Two in one | Home | Brunch bonanza »
March 28th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
The lemon bars/squares were a hit in my office, but then again diplomats, like journalists, are not too finicky when it comes to free food. Seriously, though, the consensus in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs: delicious and not too sweet!