Lemon Bars

Did somebody ask for a little drop of sunshine in bar form? My lemon bar recipe is so easy to make, foolproof and full of delicious zingy lemon flavor. The top just melts in your mouth and the bottom is this crisp, delicious shortbread crust. You're gonna love this recipe. Hey, you're watching Preppy Kitchen where I, John Kanell, teach you how to make delicious homemade dishes to share with your family and friends. These lemon bars are gonna be ready in two shakes of a lamb's tail. So let's get started. First off, we're gonna make an easy, breezy and delicious shortbread crust for our lemon bars. But before all that, oven to 350 Fahrenheit. Get a nine by 13 baking dish and line it in parchment paper. Parchment paper, parchment paper. You can do this by hand in a bowl with a spatula, but I'm gonna use my stand mixer just because the stand mixer does a better job than I do. And I have one. Into the bowl of your stand mixer, and you can sift this out. As a best practice, I always sift everything, so don't really need to, but why not? 300 grams or two and a half cups of all-purpose flour. Perfect. Half a teaspoon of salt. In you go. A little bit of balance for the sweetness. And two thirds of a cup, or about like 66 grams of confectioner's sugar. We're going to whisk it up. And no, I do not need my scale anymore. You know, I got an email last week that I had to respond to telling me that it's actually scales. Is it scales? Is that right, scales? It might be an English thing. And now we can whisk, whisk, whisk. That's all you have to do. Pop it onto your stand mixer now, and we're gonna go to town. The bowl is on the mixer. It's got a paddle attachment, and now it's time to add in 12 tablespoons, or 170 grams of unsalted melted butter. Did I say it was melted? It's melted. Turn this on, lock it, put it on low or stir, and we're just gonna drizzle it in. Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle. You could dump it in. It doesn't really matter. Let's not go crazy here. There's like shortbread flying everywhere. Okay, that looks pretty good. It kind of is like a crumbly mixture. So you can see from what I just threw on the countertop, but it'll all pat together in the pan. And can you add a little bit of vanilla? Sure, you know I'm the king of vanilla, but in this instance I'm refraining because the lemon flavor is so like out there. So I'm using my spatula just to see if there's any bits that need to be kind of mushed in a little bit more. That looks good. Okay, it's time to dump all this delicious shortbread mixture into our nine by 13 prepared pan. Whoa, it's a crumbly mess. Everything's ruined. No, it's fine. It's kind of like pastry dough where it looks like it's a rough and tumble texture, but you're going to tame it just by patting it together. So let's first kind of spread it out, move it around. A couple of Virgo tendencies are coming to life right now. Things need to be evenly placed. Okay, just use your clean hands to press, press, press, press, press. It doesn't have to be perfectly even, just, you know, mostly even. The main thing is that you have some crust at the bottom to protect our delicious lemon filling and provide a nice contrast of textures. You can use your hands, you can use your knuckles. You could even use a measuring cup if you wanted to, but that's a little bit overboard, I think. Make sure to get those corners. And this is why having a parchment lined baking dish is amazing. The parchment will just like lift right out. You don't have to worry at all about things getting stuck in the pan. I've had that happen before with brownies and it's just so sad, so sad. Brownies, click up here for my fudgy brownie recipe. It's one of my all time favorites and so just fudgy and delicious. It's like the chocolate version of this recipe. You're gonna love it. Okay, this is totally pressed down. The test would be to show you and say, look, it's totally pressed down. Pop this into the oven at 350 for about 20 minutes. Here's the deal. You could have it be ever so slightly almost golden or it could be like golden brown. It's totally up to you and how much you want to cook the shortbread crust. I like mine a little bit golden, but we'll see what I'm feeling like at the moment. While that short crust is in the oven, while that short, one more time. While that shortbread's in the oven, we're gonna be processing the sugar and lemon zest together. This will make all those oils explode out of the skin into the sugar and it's just amazing. It's optional though, you do not have to do it. So don't feel bad if you don't wanna lug your processor out or if you don't have one. I went years and years without having a food processor because I was like, I don't need one. But then eventually I was like, you know what? I'm gonna try it out and I love it now. Two cups of sugar and three cups of sugar at 200 grams. That's 600 grams of sugar. Now I'm using a microplane to zest this lemon. This is a great tool to have. I can include a link in the description if you'd like. They are so handy. You can like microplane spices like nutmeg or cardamom if you want. Zest different kinds of fruits and lots of fun things. Okay. Zest of three lemons, get them all naked. Now we're gonna whiz it up, whiz, whiz, whiz, until all the zest is broken up and your sugar's gone from white to a wonderful pastel lemon color. Okay. Lemon, oh my gosh, do you see this? Look at that. So good. It's just like this beautiful clouds of lemon sugar. You've gotta make this. Put that aside and we're gonna make our filling. It comes together so quickly, except for juicing the lemons. That takes the longest unless you have some little helpers on hand. Mine are asleep right now. Now it's time to juice our lemons. You can use a juicer, whatever you want. This is my favorite tool. It's a little, you know, wooden juicer. You wanna have one cup or 240 ml of fresh lemon juice. So delicious. I love lemon bars. They're one of the recipes my mom would make because she is a lemon-aholic when I was growing up, but they kind of fell out of favor for whatever reason. So I rediscovered the recipe recently and have been all about them ever since. These are gonna be a special treat for Brian and the boys and for me too. I'll be snacking on them at night, like mm-mm-mm-mm. Give me a lemon bar. Okay, we got one cup of lemon juice in there. Gonna set this aside for a moment and get a big bowl out. We are almost ready. It all comes together while that's in the oven and it's gonna be going back into the oven. So let's go. All right, the shortbread crust came out of the oven now. We wanna pour on the lemon filling while it is still warm. So keep on moving. All right, carefully remove these very sharp blades. Now we're gonna dump the sugar in. So fragrant. So much lemon. Look at this. It's like just beautiful clouds of amazingness. Could swim in that. Okay, half a cup or 60 grams of flour. In you go. Now give it a good whisk. Whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk. Just to distribute the flour. You know I love sifting, but in this case you don't wanna do that just because the zest is gonna clog up your sifter. It's gonna be kind of annoying. Look at this. That's a lot of deliciousness in there. Did I mention that we're gonna put some eggs in here? Yes, this is a giant, basically like lemon custard we're making. So get to cracking. You could do this in a separate bowl if you're feeling like you wanna be super safe, but I'm risking it. Whole eggs, in you go. We need eight large room temperature eggs, so keep on going until you're done. Eight large eggs, in you go. We're gonna whisk this up, but you can add lemon juice right now too. One cup of fresh lemon juice. Now it's time to mix, mix, mix, but be careful because this bowl is really, really full. Whisking things is one of George and Lachlan's favorite things to do in the kitchen, but you've gotta be strategic. Big bowl, less contents. This bowl is very full. Smells so good. And by the by, you can make all sorts of curds. This filling reminds me of my delicious lemon curd. You can click up here for that video. It is so like just zingy and full of flavor, and you can add it into or onto almost anything. And you can make curds with orange juice, with berry juice, all sorts of things. Once you're sure this is totally mixed up and homogenous, nice and neat, you can pour this into the filling. So, looks that way to me. Let's pour it into the filling. And just so you can see, this is what the shortbread looks like. It's just ever so slightly golden to the edges. It's gonna continue cooking with the curd on top. There you go. Last step before it goes into the oven the final time, we're gonna pour this delicious filling all over our shortbread crust. Mm, amazing. Get it all out. I caught it, I caught it. This'll go into the oven at 350 for about 25 minutes. The edges will be like, you know, set-ish, and the inside will be a little bit jiggly. Turn it around halfway. As it cools down, it'll set completely. So just don't over-bake it because then it gets kind of rubbery and hard. Nobody likes that. My lemon mega bar chilled in the fridge for like two hours. We had dinner, et cetera, et cetera. And now it's firm enough to cut. I wanna show you what it looks like though. Take a look. So in the middle, really, really yellow. The edge just started to lighten up and kind of rise up a little bit. So when it was in the oven, it still jiggled just a little bit, but I knew it was that you don't want it to be brown. So do not let it brown. If you do let it brown, it's okay. More powdered sugar. Anyways, let's carefully remove this out. Just get the corners first. Now for the tricky part. So tilt it and there we go. I can peel the paper away now. Just smells like lemon. It's literally a drop of sunshine in bar form. Okay, paper's peeled away. I'm gonna dust this with confectioner's sugar now. So just add a little bit in there. Tap, tap, tap. Somewhat optional, but I like the way it looks. Now we're gonna cut these, but I wanted to show you this because you wanna dampen your knife with like a wet paper towel. That'll give you a nice clean cut. I like a large lemon bar piece, although you can cut these really small. They're quite delicious and full of zing. Clean your knife off in between each cut and repeat. These are so perfectly baked. Melt in your mouth, glossy, lemon zingy realness with a crisp, crisp shortbread crust on the bottom. You're gonna love them. If you like this recipe, check out my lemon playlist. All my favorite lemon recipes and you are guaranteed to love all of them if you like lemons. It's a real thing. All right, but now it's time for a bite. So crunchy, so gooey, so much lemon. 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