When I recently made Abby Dodge's Lemon Cornmeal Shortbread Bars, I had actually intended to make a different recipe that day. I was planning to make the Blueberry Streusel Bars with Lemon-Cream Filling from Fine Cooking Cookies. I had a large container of blueberries in the fridge and all of the other ingredients are items I normally keep on hand. But when I started gathering up the ingredients I needed, I realized I didn't have any condensed milk. So I ended up baking the shortbread bars instead; they were just a few pages later in the same cookbook. But a few days, one can of condensed milk, and a new container of blueberries later, I was able to get back to the blueberry bars.
The reason I wanted to make the blueberry bars is that I was intrigued by the lemon-cream filling. It's made from condensed milk, lemon juice, and egg yolk -- basically the lemon equivalent of key lime pie filling. I was expecting something like a cross between a lemon pie and a blueberry cobbler, all on an oatmeal shortbread crust.
The crust for these bars is a mixture of flour, rolled oats, brown sugar, salt, baking powder, softened butter, and egg white. I pressed it into a parchment-lined 9-inch by 13-inch pan and baked it until the top was dry. Immediately after taking the partially-baked crust out of the oven, I topped it with room temperature blueberries (the recipe specifies that the blueberries must be at room temperature and not chilled, or they will prevent the bars from baking evenly); spooned on the lemon-cream filling (condensed milk, lemon juice, lemon zest, and an egg yolk); and baked the bars briefly until the filling formed a skin. Finally, I sprinkled on a streusel topping (which happens to be the same mixture as the crust, minus the egg white) and baked the bars until the topping was golden and the berries were bubbling around the edges.
My favorite part of these bars was the juicy blueberries. There was basically a solid layer of berries covering the entire crust, and while some of the fruit burst during baking, many of the berries remained intact. Each bite was bursting with blueberry flavor and I really liked the buttery streusel. But I found these bars a little disappointing. First, I could hardly tell they had a lemon-cream filling. There wasn't very much of it and in the photo above it's difficult to see it at all. I had been hoping for a nice cold creamy lemon layer in the middle, but instead there was just lemon flavor without any creaminess. Second, I thought there was way too much crust compared to the blueberries and lemon cream. The crust wasn't that interesting and it was basically half of the bar.
I don't mean to convey that these bars didn't taste good, because they did. They had an intense blueberry flavor lifted by a nice hit of sharp lemon -- and streusel makes any fruit better. But they just didn't quite measure up to my idiosyncratic -- and perhaps unfair -- expectations. I think that with less crust and more lemon cream, these could have been amazing.
Recipe: "Blueberry Streusel Bars with Lemon-Cream Filling" by Nicole Rees, from Fine Cooking Cookies; recipe available here at Fine Cooking.
The reason I wanted to make the blueberry bars is that I was intrigued by the lemon-cream filling. It's made from condensed milk, lemon juice, and egg yolk -- basically the lemon equivalent of key lime pie filling. I was expecting something like a cross between a lemon pie and a blueberry cobbler, all on an oatmeal shortbread crust.
The crust for these bars is a mixture of flour, rolled oats, brown sugar, salt, baking powder, softened butter, and egg white. I pressed it into a parchment-lined 9-inch by 13-inch pan and baked it until the top was dry. Immediately after taking the partially-baked crust out of the oven, I topped it with room temperature blueberries (the recipe specifies that the blueberries must be at room temperature and not chilled, or they will prevent the bars from baking evenly); spooned on the lemon-cream filling (condensed milk, lemon juice, lemon zest, and an egg yolk); and baked the bars briefly until the filling formed a skin. Finally, I sprinkled on a streusel topping (which happens to be the same mixture as the crust, minus the egg white) and baked the bars until the topping was golden and the berries were bubbling around the edges.
I don't mean to convey that these bars didn't taste good, because they did. They had an intense blueberry flavor lifted by a nice hit of sharp lemon -- and streusel makes any fruit better. But they just didn't quite measure up to my idiosyncratic -- and perhaps unfair -- expectations. I think that with less crust and more lemon cream, these could have been amazing.
Recipe: "Blueberry Streusel Bars with Lemon-Cream Filling" by Nicole Rees, from Fine Cooking Cookies; recipe available here at Fine Cooking.
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