Lemon Squares

It's really close to Christmas and I don't have any money to squander this year. I've had to get new blinds installed in my other apartment and paid 90 euros for this, and I had to get a new faucet for my kitchen sink and this cost me 159 euros. I also bought some Christmas presents to send to my family and Ronny's and sent them off and this ended up totaling to over 300 euros (including postage). No wonder I'm short on cash.

Anyhow I've been trying to keep up the holiday cheer by baking lots of things, i.e. cinnamon rolls, brioche, honey cake, saffron sweet buns, etc...and today I made some lemon squares. It's amazing how none of this costs much when you make it all from scratch.

This is a far cry from my life back in Tokyo when I was still working in advertising (and didn't bake or cook at all), but I have to say I kind of like this lifestyle. I like having the time to surf the Internet for recipes, go shopping and bake all these nice things. It's also nice to have a partner to share them with.

Anyhow the lemon squares were quite nice. The recipe is here.

I'm going to post the conversions here in grams, because I have just remembered that I went absolutely crazy trying to figure out what the various conversions were from milliliters to either cups or grams.

The metric measurements are a work in progress. I'm not sure how I managed to make these properly the first time, but they did not turn out quite right with the measurements below. I will experiment a bit more and revise this until I get it right.

Crust

120g AP Flour
40g Confectioner's Sugar
1/4 Tsp Salt (I really don't feel it's necessary to measure these small quantities in grams because unless your scale is accurate, you'll get the wrong amount anyway)
125g Butter (Even though the correct conversion seems to be 113g it does not work. I think I used 125g butter the first time and I'd add more butter if the crust doesn't seem to come together properly. The second time I added 1 Tbsp ice cold water and this did not seem to work as well, and I had to put the lemon squares back into the oven for another 10 minutes because the crust came out soggy.)


Filling

4 Large Eggs
200g Granulated Sugar
30 g AP Flour
170 Milliliters Lemon Juice
1/2 Tsp Baking Powder
1/2 Tsp Salt



Note: I baked mine for exactly 40 minutes at 160C after baking the crust at 175C for 20 minutes the first time. The second time with these metric measurements, I had to put it back in the oven after baking it for 40 minutes, for an additional 20 minutes.