Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Lemon-y Goodness

I know I've made lemon bars before, because I have the proof in a blog post. Except while I took pictures of the final product I didn't really post a recipe, so when I wanted to make some for a recent LSU game I didn't know where to start. Except that I loved the ones I made before and was hoping to recreate them. After a little google-ing I'm pretty sure this recipe from allrecipes.com was the one I used as an outline. And this time I made sure to photograph the process so the next time I know what to do!

Ingredients
1 cup butter, softened
Crust
1/2 cup white sugar
2 cups flour
Filling
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
Juice from 2 lemons
Zest from 1 lemon

Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
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2. Blend together softened butter, 2 cups flour and 1/2 cup sugar.

A mixer would have probably been good for this, but to keep things easy I basically used a knife to cut the butter into the flour/sugar. It wasn't perfectly mixed at this time, but I'm pretty sure the point is to still have a few chunks of butter.
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3. Press into the bottom of an ungreased 9x13 inch pan
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4. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until firm and golden

The time is from the official recipe, except ours never really got "golden." I think I coooked it for close to 40 minutes. You can see that around the edges it was getting dark, but the bulk of it was still white-ish. I was a little afraid of under cooking it, till I realized the eating raw butter, flour, and sugar wouldn't really be a problem.
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5. Meanwhile while the crust is baking whisk together remaining 1 1/2 cups sugar and 1/4 cup flour. Whisk in the eggs, lemon juice, & lemon zest.
The lemon zest was all my idea. I stuck with the zest from only one of the lemons afraid it would be too lemon-y, but I think you'd be safe to use both.
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6. Pour the lemon juice over the baked crust...
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and bake for an additional 20 minutes.
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7. Let cool
(I'm pretty sure I used the fridge to help this process since I was running late after it took almost forever for the crust to turn golden) and garnish with powdered sugar.
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8. Cut into bite-sized squares and enjoy!

Lemon Bars
Seriously, these are ridiculously true. And despite my long-winded rambling they are almost amazingly easy. I actually thought about picking up a box mix for this, but with so few ingredients needed, these really are worth making them from scratch.

Are you a lemon bar fan? Have you ever made them and if so, do you have a favorite recipe?

2 comments:

  1. My husband loves lemon bars. I haven't found a recipe I've been successful with. I'm going to try yours soon!

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  2. Those look delish! Thanks for stopping by my blog!

    ReplyDelete