Key Lime Bars

So my mom made this thing, this delicious key lime pie thing. She made it for the first time a couple of weeks ago for a Margaritaville party, and because we still had a number of the ingredients left over (and because it was awesome) she made it again for our 4th of July get together. The filling is a really nice mix of creamy and fluffy--I've had key lime at restaurants since then that I didn't think was as good, it was too smooth and kind of custardy--and it's got a neat citrus bite to it that goes well with the butter in the crust.

Our version breaks down like this:
1 cup finely ground graham cracker crumbs
2 1/2 tablespoons finely ground graham cracker crumbs
1/3 cup sugar
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
3 large egg yolks
1 1/2 teaspoons dried lemon peel
2/3 cup fresh Key lime juice
1 cup sweetened condensed milk, (14 ounces)
1/4 cup heavy cream

You'll notice that this is slightly different than the list in the original recipe. My mom is of the opinion that zesting is entirely too much trouble, so we used dried lemon peel instead. It's perfectly tasty. Sometime I want to try this recipe with fresh lime zest proper, but this version has plenty of zing to it, so I'm not complaining. We also didn't use the key lime slices in the presentation, because we're not quite that awesome.

We also used two ingredient tricks to make it easier to prepare. The first is store-bought graham cracker crumbs. This was mostly because my mom made so many of them for the party; if she'd just been making this for home consumption, she would have just gotten graham crackers and taken a rolling pin to them while they were still in the wax-paper package.

The other is Nellie & Joe's Famous Key West Lime Juice. Again, this was mostly necessary because my mom was making these in mass quantity for the party, and juicing 60+ key limes (they're tiny!) would have been ridiculous. But even for smaller batches, it's not a bad trick. The lime juicing would be the most time consuming part of this recipe. Without that, it takes a minute or two to mix up the crust, you can prep the filling while that's baking, and then after another ten minutes in the oven you can stick the whole thing in the fridge and forget about it until it's ready to serve. That last step is a big part of what makes this good for parties: it's really best if you make it a day ahead of when you plan to serve it.