Apricot Squares — The Joy-to-Effort Ratio Is Infinite

Summer. The grandchildren are mine again for portions of every week. Ethan, ten (post-bar-mitzvah Ethan, who now reads actual novels and discusses them with his grandmother with an intelligence that makes me think: this one. This is the one who carries the literary chain. The reading chain. The Feldman-Rosen chain of readers and thinkers and people who believe that a book can change your life and that the changing is the reading and the reading is the life).

Sophie, eight, is writing stories — the magical-kitchen stories continue, now serialized, a weekly installment of a girl named Miriam (not a coincidence; Sophie chose the name) who lives in a kitchen that cooks feelings. When you're sad, the kitchen makes soup. When you're happy, the kitchen makes cake. When you're confused, the kitchen makes bread, because bread requires patience and patience requires waiting and waiting is what confused people need to do. This is sophisticated emotional theory from an eight-year-old, and I have told Sophie that her stories are the best things I have read this year, and I mean it, and the meaning is not maternal bias (well, not entirely maternal bias) — Sophie's stories are genuinely good, and the goodness is the chain, and the chain is literary now as well as culinary, and the two chains are braiding together like the challah.

I made a strawberry galette — the free-form tart, imperfect, beautiful, the pastry rustic and the berries gleaming. The galette was for Saturday breakfast, which is when the grandchildren are in the kitchen and the kitchen is loud and full and alive, and the galette was consumed in seven minutes, which is a record for a baked good that took ninety minutes to make, and the ratio of effort to consumption is not favorable but the joy-to-effort ratio is infinite.

The galette was gone before I had washed the pan, and I stood in the kitchen thinking about fruit and pastry and the way a baked thing disappears fastest when it is made with the most love — which is either a comfort or a provocation, depending on your mood. Apricot Squares carry the same spirit: fruit gleaming inside a buttery crust, rustic and generous and completely uninterested in being elegant. I make them when the kitchen is loud, when Sophie is narrating her latest Miriam installment from the counter, when Ethan is reading at the table and looking up every few pages to ask if they are ready yet. They always are.

Apricot Squares

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 35 min | Total Time: 55 min | Servings: 16

Ingredients

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar, plus more for dusting
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold and cut into cubes
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup apricot preserves or jam
• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour (for filling)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt (for filling)
• 1/2 cup sweetened shredded coconut (optional)
• 1/2 cup chopped dried apricots
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven. Heat oven to 350°F. Lightly grease an 8x8-inch or 9x9-inch baking pan.
2. Make the shortbread base. In a bowl, combine 1 cup flour, powdered sugar, salt, and cold butter. Work together with a pastry cutter or your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Press evenly into the bottom of the prepared pan.
3. Bake the crust. Bake for 15 minutes, until just set and lightly golden at the edges. Remove from oven and let cool slightly.
4. Spread the preserves. Spoon the apricot preserves evenly over the warm crust, spreading to the edges.
5. Make the filling. Whisk together eggs, granulated sugar, 2 tablespoons flour, baking powder, salt, and vanilla until smooth. Stir in the chopped dried apricots and coconut if using.
6. Pour and bake. Pour the filling over the apricot layer. Return to oven and bake 20—25 minutes, until the top is golden and set in the center.
7. Cool and cut. Let cool completely in the pan before cutting into squares. Dust generously with powdered sugar before serving.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 195 | Protein: 2g | Fat: 7g | Carbs: 31g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 90mg