Gluten-Free Lemon Slice

Review by Jackie and Julia

Why did we make this recipe? 

Christmas 2024 descended upon us much more quickly than we anticipated! Somehow amongst all the study, travel, work, job changes, a baby, endless sleepless nights and nappy changes, we suddenly found ourselves in November with a Christmas menu to plan. 

Now, we’ll be honest, for our starter and our main, we replicated the dishes we made last year - the Prawn Mango Salad and Alison Roman’s Short ribs (find our reviews here: Prawn, Mango & Avocado Salad with Lettuce Cups; Alison Roman’s Spicy and Tangy Short Ribs). Call us lazy, but these dishes were both a huge hit last year, we just had to have them again!

What we didn't love last year, was our dessert, so we were on a mission to find something new. Jackie took it upon herself to start scrolling Pinterest to gain some inspiration. There she saw a picture of a lemon and the idea of making something citrusy suddenly came to mind. So Jackie searched for gluten free lemon slice recipes and one came up from taste.com, which seemed perfect. Taste is known for simple and easy recipes, which is exactly what we needed for our dessert this year.

What did we love?

We decided to make this dessert on Christmas Eve as we knew we would be very busy with the other recipes on the actual day. We didn’t have a slice pan (like the recipe suggests) so used a cake tin instead, which worked well.  

The dessert was very simple to put together, particularly the crumb. Sometimes base/crumbs for slices and tarts, particularly those which are gluten free, can be a bit convoluted but this wasn’t the case, and it tasted really nice so we’ll definitely be coming back to this recipe for other slices!

As I’m sure you guessed from the name, lemon is the star of the show so if you’re not a fan of citrus then this recipe probably isn’t for you! However, we absolutely loved it. The almond and coconut flavour of the crust complements the lemon tartness and sweetness really well. It’s a very strong and powerful tasting dessert so this is one you should definitely share amongst a group of people (perfect for a family Christmas gathering!).

This also stores in the fridge very well for a couple of days.

What did we not love? 

When we took our slice out of the oven, it had a bit of a film on top. It didn’t detract from the taste, but it did mean that our top wasn’t a bright yellow colour (like it is in the recipe picture). Now, this could be our fault - but we’re not too sure how it happened as we followed the recipe down to the letter. After some research, we think what caused the film to settle on top were the air bubbles caused from the eggs rising to the surface while baking. This could be to use overmixing the batter and not letting it bubbles disappear before baking the slice.

Recipe credit: Gluten-free lemon slice recipe