This is a great lemon bar recipe – bright, tart-sweet and with a buttery crust with nice vanilla notes. Meyer lemons aren’t quite as tart as Eureka and other American lemon varieties. If you’re using Meyer lemons, you might need a little extra lemon juice.
If you have teenagers, you’ll probably want to skip this blog as the main ingredient in trifle is stale cake. If you actually do occasionally have stale (or extra) cake — with or without teenagers — read on!
If you’re unfamiliar with trifle, it’s a British invention for using stale cake. Which does lead one to wonder if stale cake is a common problem for the Brits because their teenagers are sent off to boarding school.
Recently I had dessert in a lovely café near where I live. One of their signature desserts is a lemon pudding that tastes as if it may have a cream cheese base. It was so good that I decided to go home and experiment.
A couple of weekends ago I threw a tea party at New Leaf Market where I run a demo program. We have really interesting customers. We’re a community market chain, 99% of our produce is organic, we have grass-fed and humanely-raised meat and poultry, we created the sustainable fish program with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the 1990s, we donate regularly to programs within our broader community and we do whatever we can to buy local ingredients and make our community stronger and better. Needless to say, most of the people who shop at our store regularly have the same values. And a good sense of humor.
This is really good! Although it isn’t sweet, except for the dates, it’s like a savory dessert. That said, it goes very well with meats, poultry, fish or vegetarian entrees and is especially nice with Southeast Asian and Pacific Islands foods. Kids who aren’t put off by dates would really enjoy it. You could substitute raisins if you prefer.
While I was writing VANILLA, I discovered that before Thomas Jefferson brought vanilla beans to the United States, the ice cream flavor of the moment was lemon. The idea of lemon ice cream sounded intriguing, but when I looked for recipes, all I could find were lemon sorbet and sherbet. I experimented and came up with a real winner. This recipe is ideal as a light dessert and “palate cleanser.” As it’s also lower in calories than regular ice cream, it avoids the category of “guilty pleasure.”
