Pink Grapefruit Bars

For a recent school bake sale, I made two winners from this year, the gochujang caramel cookies and the black sesame shortbread. To round out the selection, I made some squares using a grapefruit curd. Unfortunately, it was a disappointment.

The recipe comes from Cook’s Country, one of America’s Test Kitchen’s magazines. I liked that the cookie base used cardamom to enhance the bittersweet flavour of grapefruit. But the curd was problematic.

Instead of red food colouring, I had the brilliant idea of using blood orange juice. I baked it a tad too long and it started to get quite dark. And the colour changed as it baked as well. But the biggest problem was that fresh grapefruit juice is not very tart and the full amount of sugar made these tooth-achingly sweet.

I really wanted to like these bars, so I tried it again a week later. This time, I omitted ½ cup sugar from the curd, doubled the lime juice, and added even more blood orange juice. This time, the colour was less dark, and the flavour more tangy. But I still didn’t nail the grapefruit flavour. Maybe more zest next time?