Eggless Lemon Bars

A few weeks ago, my cousin L and I had a friend over for dinner. I also had a single overripe banana sitting around waiting to be either used or dumped. Since I am no fan of dumping food, I looked for a way to use it up.

Banana bread requires at least 3 bananas, and so did my banana brownies. I then recalled a recipe I had stumbled upon for an eggless version of lemon bars, from Heart of a Baker. Not that I had ever tasted any classic lemon bars, I opted to give it a try.

First, I lined a small pan with my usual pâte brisée (shortcrust pastry), which I baked for about 10 minutes. Then I filled it with the lemon filling, and baked it some more. The result was a zingy, fresh bar that smelled like banana but tasted 100% lemon.

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LEMON BAR RECIPE

  Ingredients

• 1/4 recipe pâte brisée (shortcrust pastry)
• 1 ripe banana
• zest and juice of 2 lemons
• 1/2 cup sugar
• vanilla
• 1 tbs cornstarch
• 1 tbs flour
• icing sugar, for dusting

  Procedure

1. Prepare the crust in an 8 in. x 8 in. pan as per the shortcrust pastry recipe. Precook 10 mins.
2. In a bowl, mash the banana.
3. Add in the rest of the ingredients.
4. Pour into the crust.
5. Bake for 30 mins at 180˚C or until set.
6. Cool then refrigerate min. 1 hour.
7. Cut into squares or bars.
8. Dust with icing sugar before serving.

Apple Crumble Pie Bar

Three apples, sitting in a basket. Getting all wrinkled, and not so fit for eating raw. What to do when short on time? Well my quickest option was probably an apple crumble. But I wanted something a little more solid, so I opted for a kind of bar-version of this apple crumble.

All I did was make half of the crust/crumble mix recipe. I pressed half of that into a loaf pan, spooned in apple mix, and crumbled the rest of the crumble mix on top. After baking about 20 mins and letting it cool, I had something that was both tasty and easy to cut. I still have leftover apple mix (didn't really measure out the ingredients for that, and ended up with too much compared to the crust mix), so I'll have to think of something to do with that.