Fantasy Feast – Lemon Bars from A Game of Thrones

Fantasy Feast is a new post series featuring tasty foods from (mostly) fantasy books. I don’t have a set schedule for this series since I’ll be doing this as I come across food inspiration in the books I’ll be reading. If you have ideas feel free to share them with me or even start your own series of posts!

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If you’ve read A Game of Thrones, you probably remember Sansa Stark going on and on about how lemon bars are her favorite dessert. Since none of my recent reads have had memorable food choices I decided to go with an oldie this time around.

Ingredients:

Shortbread Crust (9×9 pan)

• 1 stick of butter (softened)
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• smidge of salt
• 1 heaping cup all purpose flour

Lemon Filling

• 1 cup sugar
• 3 Tbsp all purpose flour
• 3 large eggs
• 1/2 cup lemon juice
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• powdered sugar for dusting on top (optional)

Instructions:

Shortbread Crust

1. Preheat oven to 350 F and line your pan with parchment paper or spray with non-stick spray. If you use parchment paper you can easily pop the whole dessert out of the pan!
2. Mix together all the ingredients. You may find a food processor or stand mixer helpful here, but I just used a fork and a bit of muscle. It should be crumbly.
3. Transfer the dough to your baking dish and pat down the dough in an even layer. You may find it helpful to wet your fingers so the dough sticks less to you.
4. Bake for 20 – 25 minutes. The edges should begin to look golden brown. It’s going to be pretty bubbly looking – DON’T FREAK OUT!

Lemon Filling

1. Sift together the sugar and flour in a large bowl. Apparently mixing the two together helps all the ingredients mix well for the final product.
2. Add the eggs, lemon juice, and vanilla extract and whisk together until everything is combined. It should be quite liquidy.
3. Pour the filling over the warm crust and pop back into the oven at 350 F for approximately 25 minutes. It will probably look like you’re destroying your beautiful crust as your pour the filling in, but never fear – it’s supposed to do that. The filling shouldn’t jiggle anymore when you jostle the baking dish.
4. Cool at room temperature for about an hour and then pop it in the refrigerator until it’s completely cool.
5. If you used parchment paper you can now remove the whole thing from the baking dish. I recommend having an assistant or maybe a spatula at hand to keep it from breaking.
6. Dust on optional powdered sugar if you’re feeling fancy.
7. Store these in the refrigerator!

Extra: You can mix citrus juices! I used half a lime in mine since it was just hanging out after I made a batch of salsa. I’ll be trying these with some cara cara oranges soon, though will probably use less sugar since they’re much sweeter than lemons.