THING: Lemon bars

Made by: Melanie Manista-Rushforth

I just call her: Melanie Rushforth

I will not: Respect her hyphenated name

Mainly because: I'm lazy

If it were up to me: I'd just call her Mel

Which, actually: I will start calling her Mel

No, wait: I don't like the name Mel

But I do like: Her lemon bars

It took me less than 30 seconds to call bullshit on Melanie Rushforth's claim to lemon bar fame, and less than five seconds for her to come back at me with a full-fledged guarantee.

"No, really, they're awesome.  I'll bring them to Girls Weekend and you'll see what I mean," she told me.

Ah, yes, Girls Weekend! (Girls Weekend: [gurls week-end] proper noun) Gluttony at it's finest.A time for naked pillow fights, cheap alcohol, ‘80s scary movies and talk of penises.  A time in which males are not present, usually occurring at the end of a week, especially the period of time between Friday evening and Monday morning. Example: I spent the weekend at Westport Beach on a Girls Weekend and now I have unidentifiable bruises in my armpits.

So Melanie Rushforth brought her infamous lemon bars to the Third Annual DeRosa Westport Girls Weekend ... and dammit they were awesome.

Ugh, I hate her sometimes, what with her Weekly Volcano "Most Sexy Business Owner" title, a successful custom wheel business, and her outrageous and very popular Tap Into T-Town event.  Bitch.   All I wanted was for her to screw up the lemon bars.

Lemon bars are tricky.  They can be intolerant of misfired ingredients, making for either a too dry or too moist consistency.  Melanie's lemon bars, though, held the perfect crust-to-soft-lemon-flavoring ratio.  They were perfect.

A worse taste tragedy can emerge from the amount (and quality) of lemon or lemon extract used when making homemade lemon bars.  Too much of a poor quality lemon flavoring can make one feel as though they're ingesting lemon dish soap.

Again, Melanie's lemon bars were perfect.

So what if she made the best lemon bars I've ever had?  One day her perfection will shatter.  I'm bound to eventually find something wrong with her, right?

Right?

Anyway, I stole a bunch of Rushforth's lemon bars and passed them off as my own to friends and family.  So now, according to them, I make the best lemon bars in town.  Take that, Melanie!