Pyrrhic victory!

The lemon squares have been accomplished, with pretty good results. I wish I had remembered to take my digital camera charger home from school with me--sadly, there are no pictures. So the shortbread crust worked out really well, except that it was extremely fragile and crumbled a bit. I'm not sure how to fix this next time--I'm thinking maybe less butter? If you have tips, let me know.

I also made some adaptations for the filling. To start with, I used 1/2 brown and 1/2 granulated sugar. Then I infused the sugar with ginger and lemon zest. For those of you not familiar with infusing sugar, it basically just means rubbing the things you want to take the flavors of into the sugar with your fingertips. This spreads the flavors throughout the pastry instead of concentrating them in small morsels, so it basically just intensifies everything. Why ginger? Because a. I like it, b. that's what this blog is called, and c. lemon and ginger is a tried and true combo that's never failed me before. I tasted this concoction and it wasn't quite ginger-y enough though. So I added an extra tablespoon of ginger. I also added 1/2 tsp baking soda, to see if it might help the whole thing aerate--fluffy lemon bars are the best of all.

The results:

My two taste-testers concluded that the lemon bars were not too sweet with just enough lemon. ("I think these are the way lemon bars used to taste before they got made into the lemon bars we know today" says my dad, in what I perceive to be a compliment.)The shortbread was generally liked by all--I particularly enjoyed the dry, buttery taste with the lemon on top...besides the lost crumbs (ergo the title of this entry, Pyrrhic victory.) Unfortunately, despite my efforts to intensify the ginger flavor, neither of my taste testers could tell it was there at all (neither could I, oddly enough.) C'est la vie.

So that's all folks. I'd definitely recommend the recipes in the original post, but adding extra flavors (i.e. zest and juice of two whole lemons, ginger, etc.) is where its at.

Enjoy!