Best Ever Lemon Bars

I’ve never been all that fond of lemon flavored desserts — mainly because I don’t happen to believe that fruit counts as dessert — thus I have always stayed away from fruit-flavored desserts. I once made these bars upon a coworker’s request (even though I really didn’t want to) and oh how quickly I changed my lemon-flavored dessert tune. I found this dessert so delicious I decided to expand my lemon-dessert repertoire to include a lemon cream pie (which I will blog about one day when I finally have all my belongings … cookbooks! … back).

Here is the recipe that went over very, very well with both my coworkers and myself.

bar ingredients.

1. Prepare crust, set aside.
2. In a large bowl combine sugar, flour, baking powder and salt. Mix gently. Add eggs gradually and beat until smooth. Add lemon juice and zest and mix.
3. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
4. Pour lemon mixture over baked crust and set in preheated oven. Bake 1 hour or until edges just start to brown and center is firm. Remove from oven and cool completely.

crust ingredients.

• 1 ½ c. (3 sticks) butter, room temperature
• 3 c. flour
• 1 c. powdered sugar

crust directions.

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
2. In large bowl, combine crust ingredients. Mix until well combined using two knives.
3. Coat 13-by-9-inch baking pan with vegetable oil spray. Pat crust mixture onto bottom of pan. Bake in preheated oven 10 to 15 minutes or until crust just starts to turn color.
4. Sprinkle with powder sugar, let cool. Cut and serve.

Last week after a communication gaffe between sis and I, we ended up with 30 eggs in the house. I decided to make lemon bars because I knew it would use 10 eggs.

Normally I make this recipe in a glass 13×9 baking dish. The squares turn out thicker and need to be cooked for 60 minutes if not more. However, my sister doesn’t own the glass baking dish I normally use so I had to improvise. I used a 15×11 inch cookie sheet with a ridge. The bars cooked 35 minutes and turned out a lot more thin.

Recipe rating: 