No Bake Challenge 3: When Life Gives You Lemons...Make Lemon Bars!

So my family and I are going to a trip at the end of the week to Savannah, followed by a few days to Myrtle Beach, and we are in need of some snacks=perfect time to try this recipe I found for No Bake Lemon Bars!

The recipe included coconut, something my dad takes very seriously (as expected, he ate about 90% of the bars!) They weren’t as solid as I would have liked, but I’m finding that’s a trend with these no bake endeavors…This might have had to do with the fact that I couldn’t find tea biscuits at Food Lion, so I just subbed in vanilla wafers…you work with what you got! They were still good though. The lemon taste just POPS, which I love because sometimes when I make lemony baked goods, you get a hint of the taste of lemon but that’s it…what a disappointment! I would, however, appreciate tips on the best ways to zest a lemon…I usually use one of the smaller sides of a cheese grater, but so much lemon skin gets stuck in that thing!! Also, in the future I think I might toast the coconut flakes first, because I do wish they hand a more crunchy, solid feel to them.

The ingredients and directions are below!

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk

1 lemon, juiced and zested

1 1/2 cups tea biscuits, crushed (or vanilla wafers, in this case)

1 cup flaked coconut

Directions

In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt together butter and sweetened condensed milk, stirring frequently until smooth. Stir in crushed biscuits, lemon juice and zest, and coconut; mix well. Press into a 9x9 inch dish. Refrigerate overnight before slicing or the squares will come out sticky

Valentine's Baking

I've been wanting to make a lemony baked good since Christmas when my mother in law gave me a lemon cake scented candle.

The culprit....uh inspiration

But, with no one to bake for I've had to wait awhile so I could send Mike off to work with cookies in celebration of Valentine's Day. To celebrate I decided on Lemon White Chocolate Chip Butter Cookies and Peanut Butter Thumbprint Cookies. The lemon cookies satisfy my lemon craving (although I am still trying to talk my husband into letting me get a dwarf lemon tree) and the peanut butter cookies are easy to make and even easier to "valentine up", by making the jam thumbrint into a heart shape.

White Chocolate Butter Cookies- recipe adapted from Piece of Cake

1 cup unsalted butter, cut into tablespoons, at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon light corn syrup
2 tablespoons and 1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 large egg yolks
2 cups spooned and leveled all-purpose flour
1 cup white chocolate chips

1. Cream together the butter, sugar, salt, cornsyrup and lemon juice until creamy.
2. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating between them.
3. Beat in the flour
4. Stir in white chocolate chips.
5. Shape dough into a disc and divide into 4 pieces.
6. Roll each piece into a log, about 2 inches around. Wrap each log and refrigerate overnight, or at least two hours. I let two rolls sit in the fridge overnight and froze the other  two rolls.
7. When you're ready to bake preheat oven to 375. Slice each log into 12 cookies and place on baking sheet 1 inch apart. Keep the remaining dough cold while the first sheet bakes for about 15 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet halfway throught. Let cool two minutes before transferring to wire rack.

Makes 4 dozen.

Ready for the oven

White chocolate is the my least favorite type of chocolate, and I don't often opt for lemon flavored desserts, but this combination sounded intriguing enough to try. But, I burnt them so I wasn't able to get the full effect of thier goodness. It turned out to be more of a "grilled lemon white chocolate butter cookie". I'd recommend shortening the time to 10-12 minutes or reducing the temp- and make sure to put the cookies on parchment paper!

Peanut Butter Heartprint Cookies

1 cup peanut butter
1 egg
1 1/3 cups sugar or splenda
1 tsp vanilla extract
Jam

Combine with a spoon. Press into small round disks. Use fingers to make heart shaped indentions in the center. Bake 12 minutes at 350F.  Let cool some before moving to wire rack.

I love peanut butter cookies, but I'd never tried the thumbprint kind. The February edition of  Martha Stewart Living suggested that you can make almost any cookie into a thumprint style cookie, and recommended making heartprints for Valentine's day. Some recipes I looked at for thumbrint cookies suggested baking the jam into the cookies and others suggested adding the jam after. But I didn't get to find out which method worked best because in the first batch the thumbprints came out of the dough, so I opted to make them all the same. Oh well, they still tasted fabulous

Did you make any goodies for Valentine's Day?