Sadly, without pictures.

But they were really, really good.

I wanted to make some cookies to pack for our road trip last weekend, but my pantry was fairly empty and I realized I only had the ingredients to make snickerdoodles or some kind of shortbread, neither of which were appealing to me.  Then I remembered the bag of lemons in my fridge, and thought, lemon bars!  Then I reconsidered because I thought they’d be time consuming or difficult.  They were neither.

I looked for a recipe online and found that the ingredients varied wildly from recipe to recipe.  Which I thought meant one of two things: some of these recipes are practical jokes, or else lemon bars are virtually impossible to mess up.  I hoped for the latter, taking an average of what the various recipes called for.  Anything between 1.5 - 3 cups sugar?  I’ll take 2.  2-6 eggs?  I’ll use 4.  1/3 - 1 cups lemon juice?  Use 1/2 cup.  6 tbsp - 1 cup flour?  Try 1/2 cup.  One thing they all agreed on was to use fresh lemon juice, not bottled.  Check.

So here’s the recipe I used.  They turned out perfect.  Crisp shortbread crust, perfectly set but not dry filling.  Lemony but not too tart.  They also freeze well - I tried it. 

Lemon Bars

Crust:

1 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup sugar

2 cups flour

1/8 tsp salt

Filling:

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice

2 tbsp lemon zest (yellow part only - the white part, or pith, is bitter)

1/2 cup flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Cream the butter and sugar for the crust.  Beat in the flour and salt until you have a uniform, crumbly dough, then press into the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch pan.  Bake 15 mins.

For the filling, beat together the lemon juice, zest, and sugar.  Add the eggs, then the flour.  Pour over the hot crust and return to the oven for 20-25 minutes more.  Cool completely, then dust with powdered sugar.