The boys love, love, love lemon bars--which makes me laugh. I mean, I love lemon bars, too. But I'm pretty sure I didn't discover just how much until well into my college years. Before that it was all chocolate, all the time--it often still is but now I love just about every dessert. In fact, I am the absolute worst person to be with when it's time to order dessert. As I look over the menu, the convo in my head goes something like this, "oooh, chocolate molten cake. Hmmm. But I've had that a gazillion times. Ohhh, blackberry fool. Yum! I love berries. Oh! Oh! Oh!!!! Burnt sugar flan with coconut sauce. That sounds amazing--and different. But then there's a banana bread pudding--you can't go wrong with a bread pudding." And so it goes, round and round, my own version of dessert roulette until someone makes me choose. But in the end, I actually don't choose. I just go with wherever my mental ball lands when the waiter arrives, declaring the choice in a flustered manner with my eyes shut tight, scared stiff that I'm making the wrong choice. My poor husband.
Anyhoo. Back to lemon bars.
The boys like to bake with me and one of our past favorite lemon bar recipes called for cutting in chilled butter for the crust dough. I'll go ahead and pass on that when cooking with children. So I started looking for a new recipe that still gave us a to-die-for crust without fussing with airborne butter (more specifically, butter bits flicked by a four-year-old with remarkable aim).
I found one that used softened butter and brown sugar. You give up the flaky, shortbread crust you get with the cut-in cold butter. But you get a nice, chewy crust--almost carmelized--due to the brown sugar and softened butter. The filling could be tarter in my opinion so I plan to tweak that a bit. I did not have enough lemon juice for the recipe, so I added some lime juice. Maybe that made a big difference? Next time, I will play around and add at least another 1/4 cup of lemon juice (or maybe lime juice--I liked the flavor it brought). I think with all the eggs, the filling will still set up, as it was plenty firm.
Lemon Bars (adapted from Better Homes and Gardens Magazine, May 2008)
Ingredients
Directions
Enjoy!