These Italian Tea Cakes are an Italian bar cookie featuring meringue and whole lemons chopped fine.
Ingredients
2 small lemons
6 large eggs, separated
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup chopped blanched almonds
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
powdered sugar
Directions
- Boil whole lemons in plenty of water for 2 hours (this is not a typo!). Cool, remove seeds, and chop whole lemons very fine. You will end up with a wet pulp…there is no need to preserve the juice that escapes the chopping process, as the juice that is in your pulp is enough. Preheat oven to 350F and line a 9 x 13-inch cake pan with parchment paper (important!). Beat egg yolks till frothy. Slowly add sugar, chopped lemon, and almonds. Beat egg whites until stiff. Gently fold the egg whites into the egg yolk mixture. Pour mixture into prepared pan. Bake about 40 minutes or until lightly brown (keep a close eye on these and check them frequently.) Check for doneness by inserting a wooden pick, which must come out clean. When cool, cut into 1-inch by 3-inch strips and dust with powdered sugar. A tip for cutting these is to lift the whole thing out of the pan with the parchment paper, and use a large pizza cutter to slice them.
Notes
- When I was re-doing this website in 2021 and, in the process removing any recipes that rated less than 4 stars, this cookie at 3.9 stars technically should have been removed. But it is SO unusual and spending some time on Google I simply could not find anything else quite like it anywhere else (and I cannot now remember where it came from, I’ve had it forever). Most of the lower reviews were simply because the cookie stuck to the pan and could not be removed, and so I re-wrote the recipe to be more clear and address this issue. I removed the reviews that scored the cookie low for that reason alone. We’ll see if it will merit being saved!