I’m still thinking about the gluten-free lemon bars, because while, yes, they were a great improvement over the first attempt, and the flavour of the gluten-free flour was pretty mild when I ate the test piece, once they’d been sitting out for a bit at the event, it became a lot more pronounced. Not terrible, but definitely noticeable. And it’s specifically in the crust, a friend confirmed that- which makes sense, the curd has three tablespoons of flour in it, the crust has a cup and three quarters.

But when I use this same flour to make my shortbread cookies, I can’t taste it at all. And at first I thought it might be because it has a wet ingredient covering it, and they’re interacting together, but thinking it over some more, I realised it was probably a lot simpler than that:

The shortbread calls for one part of flour, one part of cornstarch and just over half of one part of powdered sugar. The lemon bar crust uses the same ingredients but calls for, as I mentioned above, a cup and three quarters of flour, a quarter cup of cornstarch and two thirds of a cup of powdered sugar. Those ratios are completely different, with waaay more flour in the lemon bars. There’s just more of it there to make itself known. Additionally, the shortbread uses two sticks of butter, and the lemon bars one and a half, so it’s a dryer dough.

So, before I make them again next time, I’m going to do some math on both recipes and figure out the percentage of each ingredient based on the total weight of dry ingredients, and use the shortbread proportions  of 1:1:~.5 but with the total weight of the lemon bars, while keeping the stick and a half of butter.

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