Ina's lemon bars (by way of Smitten Kitchen)

Don't you love it when someone else does the work for you?

Take these lemon bars, based on an Ina Garten recipe, no doubt delicious in its original form, but tweaked to perfection by the inimitable Deb at Smitten Kitchen. She always gets it right, doesn't she? I don't read many of the superblogs, like the Pioneer Woman or Orangette, but I do sometimes look at Smitten Kitchen. While she may not need me as a reader, I need her expertise now and then--and her thoughtful revisions to recipes.

For Ina's lemon bars, she reduced the sugar and came up with proportions that evened out the lemon-to-crust ratio. I split the recipe in half and baked it in an eight-inch glass pan. I had to bake the crust a bit longer than the recipe said, about 22 minutes. Once the lemony layer (I used Deb's thinner version) was spread over the baked crust, the bars went in for an additional 25 minutes. You can find the recipe and variations here.

These were the perfect combination of sweet and tangy, held up by a buttery, crumbly (but not too crumbly) shortbread crust. I used meyer lemons, of which I happen to be inordinately fond. But plain lemons would be more than fine. 

These just might give your old stand-by lemon bar recipe a run for its money.