Foodie Friday - Lemon Thyme Bars

I was watching the food network and during a commercial break Giada De Laurentis showed how to make Lemon Thyme Bars. I had all the ingredients and decided to make it with my Daughter-in-Law.

The recipe can be found here: Lemon Thyme Bars.

First we made a trip to to Perennial Herb Garden to pick Thyme. We separated the leaves from the stems and then chopped. We needed 2 Tablespoons. We had one.
So we repeated the whole thing over again.

I let my daughter-in-law be the hand model. She lives in the city and does not garden, so her hands look nicer than mine.
We combined 1 cup of flour, the thyme and 1/2 tsp. salt.

Then we beat 1 stick of unsalted butter with 1/2 cup powdered sugar until it was light and fluffy.

To that we added 2 Tablespoons of Lemon Juice and 1/2 tsp. vanilla and beat that with the butter and sugar.

We turned the mixture on low and gradually added the flour/thyme mixture.

My daughter-in-law pressed it into a greased and floured dish.
The dish was supposed to be 8 x 8, Mine was 10 x 10. That explains a lot about how these turned out.

After pressing we baked them for about 30 minutes. I say "about" because I forgot to turn on the timer. This was about the time we discovered the Black Widow Spider (featured in my last post).

We baked it until it was golden and looked set.
We don't know how long that was.

It seemed longer than 30 minutes though.

As you can see in this shot, there was too much pan and not enough dough.  And what we ended up with was much thinner than Giada's looked.

But pressing onward, we mixed 2 Tablespoons of lemon juice with 1/2 cup of powdered sugar until smooth and spread it over the Lemon Thyme Bars. Then we let it sit for a half hour to firm up.

In the end, in spite of the mistakes, these were pretty tasty. I never really thought of using an herb like Thyme in a baked good.

We gave them two thumbs up, but will look for an 8 x 8 pan if we decide to make them again!