White Chocolate Bars with Nuts and Lemon

This will be the last lemon recipe for a while, to the relief of others, as it used the last of the lemon curd I made just over two weeks ago.

This was based on this recipe for White Chocolate and Macadamia Nut Brownies, which I've used before, but I made quite a few changes, including inadvertently increasing the sugar by 50%! I intended to use only walnuts, but didn't have enough in stock, so had to change my plans here too.

The result was a dense, moist chewy bar which tasted quite nutty, but surprisingly the lemon flavour was very mild. I wonder if the white chocolate somehow masked the flavour of the lemon?

Ingredients

60g butter
150g caster sugar
2 tablespoons water
180g white chocolate - chopped into small pieces
2 large eggs
150g plain flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
large pinch salt
finely grated zest 1 lemon
80g approx lemon curd
90g finely chopped nuts - I used equal amounts of walnuts and hazelnuts

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 160C, and line a 8" square shallow tin with baking paper.

Mix the lemon zest, baking powder and salt into the flour.

Heat the water, butter and sugar together in a medium saucepan until the butter has melted, then remove from the heat, add the white chocolate and stir until it has melted.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the flour mix, followed by the nuts and lemon curd. Stir until evenly mixed.

Pour into the prepared tin and spread evenly. Bake for about 40 minutes, until a tester comes out with a few moist crumbs still clinging.

Cool in the tin, then cut into 16 portions when completely cold.