Lemony Squares: A Series of Unfortunate Events

Desserts are insidious to begin with. I eat just one, and for days I’m ravenous for more. For that very reason, I usually keep a tight rein on my eating of sweets, but sometimes the beast runs away with me. This time it was a dinner party at my friend Karen’s. She served marvelous pastry bars called Lemon Squares. Our many compliments led her to show us the cookbook they came from, a favorite of hers: Lee Bailey’s Country Desserts.

This is what a carnival barker might call a Copious Compendium of Calorific Concoctions. Large format, more than 150 recipes, every one gorgeously photographed – a pin-up gallery, a beauty pageant, a dream book. I bought a copy the very next day, following Oscar Wilde’s sensible advice (“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”). Since then, Tom and I have been salivating over its pages. After an initial test of two kinds of breakfast muffins – blueberry and banana-walnut; both very successful – I was ready to make a batch of Lemon Squares.

Or so I thought.

The recipe was a bit unusual but didn’t sound at all tricky. To start, you beat together butter, flour, and confectioners’ sugar; press this dough into a baking pan; and firm it up in a moderate oven. Meanwhile you beat together eggs, sugar, lemon rind and juice, chopped walnuts, baking powder, and a bit more flour. Pour this topping over the pastry base and bake until the filling is set. Let cool a while and cut it in squares. Piece of cake (as it were), no?

No. Not for me, anyway.

My baked sheet of lemon pastry seemed to have been vulcanized into the pan. It stuck with a persistence that might make it valuable as a pot hole filler on Third Avenue. Trying to loosen it from the edges of the pan and cut it into squares made the crust crumble and crack. The general effect was of a poorly preserved antique pavement after an earthquake.

Persuading the squares out of the pan only compounded the problem, and the results were pretty pitiful. Underneath the falling-apart crust, the filling was like a partially cooked lemon curd, soft and gloppy.

The squares didn’t taste bad, if you didn’t mind their rugged, ragged shape and the squishy, semi-liquid lemon filling. But something major had to have gone wrong. So next day I e-mailed the above photos to Karen: Help! Aiuta me! A moi! Here’s what happened to my lemon squares. Can you think why they weren’t as neat and lovely as yours?

Karen was all sympathy, and she replied with some suggestions. The only major differences she described were that she’d baked her pastry base longer, and she didn’t add walnuts at all. I consulted my own cooking conscience (a pretty severe Methodist monitor): My baking powder was quite old; instead of four large eggs I’d used three jumbos; when I tested the filling, maybe it wasn’t truly firm. Let’s try this again.

I did a half recipe the second time, getting fresh baking powder and the right-sized eggs. Beat the pastry base to a fare-thee-well (it was supposed to become “fluffy” but didn’t, either time). Put a raised rim around the pastry in the pan, to try to contain the filling better, and kept it in the oven for the first baking until it was light brown. Whomped the eggs and sugar until they were pale as cream. Added the remaining ingredients (but not walnuts), poured it into the pan, and baked until seven minutes after the filling felt firm to me. Let it cool longer in the pan before attempting to cut squares.

And here they are:

Not quite as messy as the first batch, but I think much of that was due to the absence of nuts – which made it easier to run a knife blade through the filling. It didn’t stick quite so nastily to the sides of the pan either, and didn’t crack and crumble quite as much.

But I couldn’t cut clean-edged, smooth squares, like Karen’s. And my lemon filling was still too moist. (Refrigerated overnight, the filling did firm up somewhat.) And neither of my batches looked anything like the photo in the book.

So: twice skunked. To do them justice, the second batch of squares were decent enough for the family to eat, but nothing I would ever serve to guests. I’m not eager to try a third time. I may have to sneak into Karen’s kitchen one day and watch how she makes them.

*

Postscript: I hate to waste food. So I bagged up the first batch – they crumbled yet more as I handled them – and put them in the freezer. One day I’m going to defrost some of them, crumble them up completely, press them into a pie dish, bake it some more so it becomes a sort of crumb crust (I hope), fill the shell with peaches and top with whipped cream. If it’s good I’ll call it Snickety Pie. Or maybe it will just be one more unfortunate event.