At the same time that I made the lemon curd and the lemon squares I wrote about a few weeks ago, I also made these “Florida Lemon Squares†from a Maida Heatter recipe. I had a 
lot of lemons that week and I was deluding myself into thinking this recipe could possible be classified as healthy since it includes a cup of old fashioned oatmeal… I figured if I ate enough of these lemon squares, I would eventually eat enough oatmeal to clear out my intestines! Talk about dopey rationalizing…at any rate, these cookies/squares were delicious and really easy to make. Definitely a recipe to be repeated in our household. You will need the following ingredients: 1 and ½ cups sifted all purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, 1 can of condensed milk (15 ounces), finely grated lemon rind from 1-2 lemons, ½ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice, seeds removed, 12 tablespoons of unsalted butter, 1 cup muscovado sugar, packed down and 1 cup of old fashioned oatmeal.
Turn your oven on and set to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9×12 inch pan. Sift together the flour baking powder and salt and set this aside. In a medium sized bowl, add the condensed milk and the lemon rind and whisk to mix. Then slowly add the lemon juice and whisk to 
keep the mixture smooth. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and add sugar and mix well. On the lowest speed, add the sifted flour mixture and bbeat only until incorporated. Mix in the oatmeal. The mixture will be crumbly. Sprinkle half of this mixture onto the bottom of the pan and pat it down to smoothen it out. Then add the lemon mixture and spread it as evenly as possible over the oatmeal base. Sprinkle the remaining half of the oatmeal mixture on top of the lemon mixture and try to smooth it out a bit. Some lemon will make its way to the surface. Perfection here is not required. Bake this for about 30 minutes until the dessert has a slightly golden surface. Cool the cake completely, then pop in the fridge for several hours before cutting. Cut into desired size (smaller is better as these are intensely flavored) and use a spatula to recove squares from the pan. Sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar just before serving…
7 Responses
Your radar for great goodies is really up and running in picking this one. Very new to me, bar cookies where condensed milk is one of the key ingredients in intensifying the flavor and fortified the lemon filling. Oatmeal embedded with butter and sugar for texture heightened more the structure of the cookies. It sounds like a 1-2-3 baking but utterly good result!
That’s like my adding flax seed to my banana bread and calling it the healthier recipe, even though I still used a block of butter and nuts and sugar.
Did you use any of the lemon curd on this one?
oatmeal is also my remedy for turning something sinful to someting healthy…or so I figure…LOL!
Marketman, I must confess that I have linked one of your old pages (featuring the turbobroiler) in the eGullet food blog that I have been writing. I was invited to write a food blog for a week and was looking for a picture of a turbo broiler oven. Lo and behold, my googling yielded your site. I have credited you for the page and the link, if you wanna see it – the blog is on
https://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=99900&st=0
Once again, I couldn’t have done it without you.
Thank you.
Doddie
Hi MM, did you use a foil pan or did you line your pan with foil? Do i need to grease it if I lined it with foil?
Candygirl, I buttered a foil pan… I only used foil because I was planning to take the finished product elsewhere… but a regular pan is fine, just butter it well beforehand.
Thanks! Got some lemons from Sidcor this morning, will try this recipe tomorrow :-)