Comments on your coding style: you should not use double quotes (") for strings that do not need evaluating. If it contains no variables that you want to be expended, use a single quote (').
To access arrays in templates, you cannot use " (and afaik, ' wont work either) around the array key, it needs to be blank like $array[key].
About that last part, that is correct.
The whole string is eval()d in double quotes, so "blah blah $var['key']" will generate a parse error, but "blah blah $var[key]" won't. This doesn't apply to conditions!
Alternatively, you could use "blah blah {$var['key']}"