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i wanted to make a lemon meringue pie, but the meringue failed to form peaks, so i thought i could just pour the lemon curd in and bake the pie without the meringue. i suppose i had the wrong expectations: i wanted a smooth and creamy baked curd, but in the end i got some ugly grainy-looking mess. it's like oprah winfrey's line all over again.

but i happened to read jia en's dorie greenspan book and found a short writing about lemon cream. yes, what i had imagined was a lemon cream pie, and i couldn't have gotten it by baking the lemon curd. even though the ingredients for lemon curd and cream are the same, their different methods of preparation gives them distinct textures.
so i had to live with the ugly pie. the taste turned out to be very sharp, probably because i reduced the sugar in the curd. it's definitely big on lemon flavour. and the crust? sufficiently thick, almost perfect, i think. i thought i had added too much water when i made the dough in a large batch, and over-kneaded it, but the proportion of butter was still high enough to give a short and tender crust. (i went below the 2:1 ratio by quite a bit in order to get a richer dough.)
and speaking of dorie greenspan, jia en and i made our variation of her variation of her best chocolate chip cookies. we call ours 'almond peanut-butter chocolate-chip cookies'. in her introduction to the recipe, she says she'd found the perfect ratio of white to brown sugar, giving just the right chew and flavour to the cookie. and i too think the proportion is perfect (though jeffrey cookies are in their own way perfect as well).

i think the best buy was the ghirardelli chocolate chips. ntuc has given me two surprises in two days: first it was the gold medal all-purpose flour yesterday, and today it was the ghirardelli chocolate chips.

the peanut butter taste was subtle, and the dough baked up to give very nicely rounded cookies. i think i'll need to hold jia en's book hostage.