Lemon Bars for the Soul

One night last week I made lemon bars, not because I really wanted them, or because I am especially good at making them, but because when I am being pulled in too many different directions, and am feeling overwhelmed beyond hope, taking an hour to spend with my girls, and my grandmother, is the right thing to do.

There are three things I can bake that are edible: lemon bars, apple pie, and chocolate mayo cake. All three I learned while sitting at the counter in my grandmother's kitchen, watching her fly around in a flurry of flour, waiting to get my just washed fingers in the pie dough, or shortbread crust. Everything got one more pat of butter, one more squeeze of lemon, one more shake of cocoa powder, just the extra ingredient to make it hers, and mine to learn not from the notes in her book but from the time spent together. And now, as an adult with both a parent and children who require my attention, sometimes I need an hour to squeeze some extra lemon and make something that is, almost, all mine.

The last two lemon bars found their way into the lunch boxes on the first day of school, nestled next to a few fresh picked blueberries. Sometimes lemon bars can comfort in being made, and sometimes in being found, on the first day when a reminder of home might be just what you need as you find a seat in the crowded lunchroom.


Mimi's Lemon Bars

Crust
1/2 cup butter, softened a bit but still cold
1/2 cup powdered sugar (plus a bit more for dusting)
1 cup flour

Mix pastry and spread in 8x8 pan, bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

Custard
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 T. flour
3 T. lemon juice
1/2 t. baking powder

Mix and pour over baked crust. Bake once again at 350 for 15 minutes (but I find it always takes a bit longer). Sprinkle with powdered sugar and cut once cooled.

*Image courtesy of whatscookingamerica.net, with my thanks. I forgot to take a picture, primarily because most things I bake are just so bad.

Sur La Table, Sur La Birthday

My birthday is rolling around again in a few days. Because my husband, who dislikes all celebrations that involve gift giving, finds my birthday, where he is really expected to come up with something, the most painful of them all, I try to offer some subtle suggestions. He is really very lucky; a perfectly fine birthday gift is a good book, one that he took the time to pick out just for me, knowing me well enough to know what I like to read. He has now convinced himself that we are in grave danger of falling, all of us, into the apartment downstairs due the weight of the books in our home, so has mandated a moratorium on book buying, which has not affected, one bit, my personal book shopping, but it has his. Thus, I have had to be a bit more creative. In mid May I left the Williams Sonoma catalog on the dining room table, which he promptly tossed in the recycling. Last week I flipped through the mail while he watched baseball, casually pointing out all the amazing baking gadgets available at Sur La Table.

"You don't bake".
"I might if I had this bundt pan".
"Allyson, you have a bundt pan. When was the last time you made a bundt?"

We tried this about 6 years ago. While in Sur La Table I pointed out the most amazingly beautiful cake pan I had ever seen, a sheet pan with daisy outlines, which of course would allow me to make the loveliest cakes ever seen, all moist and delicious, each one with a hint of lemon, to be served at the tea parties I would soon be hosting with my daughters. To date I have made one cake, kind of. What I made was a dense scrubbing utensil which adhered to the daisies like super glue. It hinted not of lemon but of eggs and shook like jello when cut. I made an omelet in a cake pan, to the delight of my husband.

"I want to bake."
"Fine, and when you learn I will buy you a bundt pan, but for now, you are well suited for bundts."

For me, the bundt (which I now say as boondt, and will forever do so, as did the mom in My Big Fat Greek Wedding) is the quintessential baked good, the one thing I feel I should be able to do effortlessly, as in, "oh I just whipped up this vanilla bundt with blueberry glaze, would you like a slice?", but I can't.

The reality is that I am a terrible baker. I'm a decent cook and pretty good at pulling out what I find in the refrigerator, mixing it up with pasta and calling it dinner, but I cannot ever prepare the next course, not if it involves heat, leavening agents and measuring spoons.

"Mom, can we have dessert?"
"Not tonight, you already had something sweet today."
"When?"
"Didn't you have grapes in your lunchbox?"

Early on I lived with the delusion that if I served sweets casually, not as treats, my darlings would grow up similarly to French children who taste wine at a young age; that is to say that sweets would not be a big deal. The problem was that my sweets were not at all sweet, on the rare occasion that I actually baked something. So this theory was soon scrapped en lieu of don't give them sweets and they will not develop a taste for them and their precious teeth will not rot and fall out of their small mouths. That has not worked too well either. It turns out that children really liked baked goods, almost all of them.


We did not eat dessert when I was young. Occasionally Dad would take us for ice cream but my mother has never, not once in her life, baked anything that remotely resembled dessert. When all the other kids brought homemade cupcakes to school on their birthday, I brought Tootsy Rolls. I once took a bag of Milanos as my contribution to a school bake sale (they sold). When it was my turn to bring treats to the Girl Scout meeting, and I begged for something homemade, my mom whipped up graham crackers with pieces of a Hershey bar stuck in the middle (her specialty was graham crackers with applesauce in the middle but that didn't travel well). Things don't change. About every third time I talk to my mother on the phone she says, "I'm really on to this fabulous new dessert idea, you've got to try it! It's just a scoop of vanilla ice cream with a few splashes of Scotch on top, and then finished off with freshly ground pepper. Do you need to write that down Allyson?". Even I've got that one Mom. This is the same woman who routinely suggests that I serve buttermilk mixed with jarred salsa to my children, "honestly, the best soup I have ever had, serve it in mugs!".

The bigger issue is that I want to be a baker. I really want to be the mom who rushes in, powder on her nose, with a large box of freshly baked, and oh so tasty, cupcakes tucked under her arm. It seems logical to me that what I should do, in working to accomplish this goal, is to acquire all the snappy baking gear I can from Sur La Table, store it in our already overburdened kitchen cabinets, and continue to wish that I could be her, the baker mom. It doesn't take much insight to recognize that, as a child who was clearly served one too many vanilla ice creams Scotch sundaes, I just want to give my children something I never had: a bake sale donation that does not say Pepperidge Farm on the outside of the package.

The new summer catalog arrives; I leave it on the kitchen island, open to the cake pop pans.

"You don't bake. What would you do with these?"
"Think about summer, think about how cute those would be decorated with the little flags!"
"Who will do that?"
"Me."
"You don't bake, you would make weaponry with these."

"How about a new cookbook?"


First image, courtesy of Molly's Cupcakes, the wonderful place that saves me when baking is required. The second, from my favorite Sur La Table.

Bakers Two, Part Deux

It's been a very long week, which is not the way I wanted to kick off the holiday season. It happens, but I've lost any inclination to write, or cook, or change my socks. I'm re-posting, from my limited selection of holiday related essays. It might happen again; I'm too busy enjoying the falala and the hohoho to take off my dancing shoes and flex my fingers.

Bakers Two, originally posted in January of 2010.

He was certain, or close to certain, that there were two girls. As I had spent the better part of the previous five months faking excitement while staring at the foggy screen, I had no real means to challenge his opinion, and Jack was passed out on the floor, the words "two girls" having sent him directly under the table, head first. "Really, two girls, really? You are quite sure?", and he was, what he saw, and what I did not, was two girls. And to think, I had been busing around all this time assuming two boys were causing me all this discomfort. I threw water on my husband, dressed and hurled myself towards the door.

Fueled by my relationship with my father, I had assumed, for the years I spent not pregnant and without children, that if in fact I was ever fool enough to throw myself into this madness, I would come out on the other side the mother of boys. To be fair, those spanky little navy blazers at Brooks Brothers figured into my future vision, perhaps my son would be born in that. He was not, in fact he came out naked, two times and in drag.

At some point I realized, once I took control of my pink phobic mind, that really, some of my very best childhood memories were directly related to my being a girl. Days spent at the ballpark with my dad included, as were the hours I amassed sitting at the counter in Mimi's kitchen. Every September we baked apple pies, for Valentine's Day a heart shaped cake and at Christmas, peppermint cookies, sugar cookies and whiskey balls. Of course I could have been a boy, and there were days that my father might have thought that perhaps I was, but there was something to my girl days in the kitchen, and in a quick moment I realized that I could relive those wonderful memories with my girls. And this realization made the tiny blue blazers a thing of the past, red aprons were in my future, I was certain.

The first Christmas rolled around; at three months they were very little help, which I found truly frustrating. Mary slept through most of the Bing Crosby serenaded day while Kate fussed and insisted on sitting in the kitchen.When I then spilled a good amount of powdered sugar directly onto her small head, an indoor winter wonderland covering her small and once happy infant body, she voiced her displeasure accordingly.

Four years later she is content to bathe in powdered sugar, or chocolate, or both. There are few pleasures greater than spilling an entire cup of flour on her sister, who then returns the favor, but with melted butter. Cocoa works especially well for airborne mess, and cookie decorating sugars are best used to enhance the somewhat dull brown and black hair that covers Eleanor Roosevelt. And when we have at last exhausted all our baking efforts, the girls revel in licking all things containing raw eggs which, as we know, was not a problem at all when I was a child. Before raw eggs were exposed as the horrifically dangerous orbs that we now know them to be, I, like many, was encouraged to lick away all remaining raw eggs from toxic plastic bowls. Not so in 2009, uncooked eggs pose every possible danger to children and I scream in horror when their batter covered fingers touch their faces. Once recovered, we all walk down the street to eat raw tuna on rice for dinner.

Valentine's Day is just over a month away. Optimistically I will have the heart shaped cake pan greased and ready, the very same one I used so long ago in that red kitchen with the old gal who had endless patience for what must have been a challenging bake off. My memories, thankfully, do not recount her putting her head on the counter and begging for sanity while loudly pleading for an armed fairy cleaning woman at her beck and call; perhaps my girls can block that out as well.

Appreciative, Then and Now

There are those who subscribe to the commonly held belief that cooks don't bake, and bakers don't cook. I am a believer, and in that I consider myself a decent cook, good not great, it follows then that I don't bake, or at least I shouldn't. But Monday night I was up late, buried in a lemon blueberry bundt cake, elbows deep into a cinnamon crumble coffee cake, chopping pineapple and cutting strawberries, way past my bedtime. Tuesday was the Teacher Appreciation breakfast at school, for reasons unknown I was left in charge of the bakers.

Aside from my want to someday be one of those moms who can whip up cupcakes for the entire class in minutes more than the actual required baking time, I have a genuine affection for teachers, and a need to thank them for choosing to spend their days with my children, exposing themselves to every kind of childhood illness imaginable, understanding just how precious these children are to the parents who dropped them off that morning. Two little girls who like school more each day than they did the day before, their teacher has provided them with a wonderful place to learn and grow, and I believe, without a doubt, the kind of beginning to education necessary to foster lifelong learners. For that I am forever grateful.

Mrs. Unruh scratched on almost every paper I handed in "write more! write more!". She kept me after school, as I remember, every day for talking out of turn; she was challenging, tall, and sometimes scary, and she encouraged me to do what I loved. Mrs. Grow, tired of hearing me yell out "gadzooks" every time I needed an expletive, suggested I create a dictionary of my own words. Mrs. Willingham, in all her sing song glory, taught me to recite poetry and to remember to always send a written note. And Mrs. Chamberlin patiently showed me book after book, imploring me to explore behind the cover, to read things on the other side of the library, and to discover characters beyond Ramona, Encyclopedia Brown and Henry Huggins. Maybe the best way to thank the teachers is to remember them, even when you are old, and to know just how greatly they impacted the person you became.

The lemon bundt cake was beautiful, perfectly shaped and covered in a pretty yellow glaze. The crumb cake was brown, spotty, lumpy and reminiscent of what I assume an underground sewer eruption might look like, at the street level. Confidently I sliced a piece of the lovely bundt, it was gooey, a beautiful yellow mess, a molten like somewhat raw cake, probably not edible, at least not safely. The hideous eruption was wonderful, moist and unsightly, tasty and not full of food borne illnesses. But of course I knew, as Mrs. Chamberlin taught me, you can't judge a book by it's cover.

Bakers Two

He was certain, or close to certain, that there were two girls. As I had spent the better part of the previous five months faking excitement while staring at the foggy screen, I had no real means to challenge his opinion, and Jack was passed out on the floor, the words "two girls" having sent him directly under the table, head first. "Really, two girls, really? You are quite sure?", and he was, what he saw, and what I did not, was two girls. And to think, I had been busing around all this time assuming two boys were causing me all this discomfort. I threw water on my husband, dressed and hurled myself towards the door.

Fueled by my relationship with my father, I had assumed, for the years I spent not pregnant and without children, that if in fact I was ever fool enough to throw myself into this madness, I would come out on the other side the mother of boys. To be fair, those spanky little navy blazers at Brooks Brothers figured into my future vision, perhaps my son would be born in that. He was not, in fact he came out naked, two times and in drag.

At some point I realized, once I took control of my pink phobic mind, that really, some of my very best childhood memories were directly related to my being a girl. Days spent at the ballpark with my dad included, as were the hours I amassed sitting at the counter in Mimi's kitchen. Every September we baked apple pies, for Valentine's Day a heart shaped cake and at Christmas, peppermint cookies, sugar cookies and whiskey balls. Of course I could have been a boy, and there were days that my father might have thought that perhaps I was, but there was something to my girl days in the kitchen, and in a quick moment I realized that I could relive those wonderful memories with my girls. And this realization made the tiny blue blazers a thing of the past, red aprons were in my future, I was certain.

The first Christmas rolled around, at three months they were very little help, which I found truly frustrating. Mary slept through most of the Bing Crosby serenaded day while Kate fussed and insisted on sitting in the kitchen. When I then spilled a good amount of powdered sugar directly onto her small head, an indoor winter wonderland covering her small and once happy infant body, she voiced her displeasure accordingly.

Four years later she is content to bathe in powdered sugar, or chocolate, or both. There are few pleasures greater than spilling an entire cup of flour on her sister, who then returns the favor, but with melted butter. Cocoa works especially well for airborne mess, and cookie decorating sugars are best used to enhance the somewhat dull brown and black hair that covers Eleanor Roosevelt. And when we have at last exhausted all our baking efforts, the girls revel in licking all things containing raw eggs which, as we know, was not a problem at all when I was a child. Before raw eggs were exposed as the horrifically dangerous orbs that we now know them to be, I, like many, was encouraged to lick away all remaining raw eggs from toxic plastic bowls. Not so in 2009, uncooked eggs pose every possible danger to children and I scream in horror when their batter covered fingers touch their faces. Once recovered, we all walk down the street to eat raw tuna on rice for dinner.

Valentine's Day is just over a month away. Optimistically I will have the heart shaped cake pan greased and ready, the very same one I used so long ago in that red kitchen with the old gal who had endless patience for what must have been a challenging bake off. My memories, thankfully, do not recount her putting her head on the counter and begging for sanity while loudly pleading for an armed fairy cleaning woman at her beck and call; perhaps my girls can block that out as well.

Bad Bread, Good Friend

Old and soon to be rotten bananas, check. Flour, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, butter, fine. Eggs? Really? I called my friend and neighbor Allison, an accomplished baker, "I'm baking...", both she and Jack, in our kitchen, started laughing. I continued, "banana bread, and you need eggs" more laughter, "may I borrow an egg?". Hours and hours in the kitchen, I am at my happiest toddling away, mixing, adding, dashing and creating but baking, I'm terrible. Really bad, occasionally painful, we've spent many Thanksgiving dinners spreading butter on virtual rocks, but I press on, certain that these treats I offer will be received with love, confident in our very good dental insurance.


We have a bread machine, foolproof I was assured, can't go wrong, delicious every time! Taped to the top of the bread machine is a large sign "Don't forget the yeast", left there by my wise husband. Foolproof is a relative term, subjective when considering the fool.


There is a long list somewhere of things I really don't do well but at the top, next to baking, you will find gardening. Similar to my singing delusions, I believe in my botanic abilities. My husband thought that by housing me in a small urban space I would surrender my dreams of garden grandeur, not so my love. Every spring I drag the family to the nursery, filling our cart with hanging baskets, flowers and herb plants, with all the best intentions. Last year, in a show of support, Jack bought me a book on urban gardening. I read all the pertinent sections, made lists, and confidently set out to outfit our small porch with flowering plants, to be enjoyed all season long. By Independence Day we were enjoying kindling, concerned about a misguided firework hitting a hanging plant corpse and sending the whole building up in flames.


Allison the baker is on to me. In our take on suburban lawn envy, she surveys the devastation on our front porch while I gaze at her jungle like back porch, overgrown with flora, green with envy. Occasionally she will casually mention that she waters her plants every morning, as if that might be the secret to botanic genius. Right, if I only remembered to water, well maybe that would actually help. And, to top it off, she's not afraid of yeast, not at all, bakes bread constantly. Yeast terrifies me. Who can live next door to this kind of domestic maven?

Gardening, like baking, requires nurturing, patience, and care. Similar qualities are generally attributed to mothers as well, as any of the Mother's Day cards available now will attest. I do remember to water the children, they are fed, reasonably clean and left in the sun occasionally, albeit slathered with sunblock. They continue to grow and flourish, despite my horticultural inadequacies. And fortunately a good loaf of bread is only a short walk away, with a good friend who is willing to share.

The banana bread? Burned both loaves.