What size does the recovery partition need to be for Lion or Mt Lion?

Maybe I'm approaching the problem the wrong way. My problem is that I installed a new HDD in my laptop after cloning it to a backup drive, and I wanted to install the OS after formatting the drive using Disk Utilities from my desktop machine. Since I had Lion installed from the App Store as a paid download, I thought I'd start with a freshly downloaded install of Lion, but I can't access the internet directly with my laptop since it has no OS or apps. So I'm downloading Lion to my desktop machine hoping to install it on my laptop as a Target HD. Is that possible? Does the App Store download allow choosing which drive to install on?