Lemon Bars

Gooey, soft and custard-textured lemon curd bakes on top of a soft and buttery shortbread cookie crust, with HALF the amount of butter compared to most Lemon Bars recipes! Using a secret weapon I have on hand in my kitchen cupboard for these type of craving emergencies, these lemon bars are incredible!

Best Lemon Bar Recipe

Also known as lemon squares, these Lemon Bars have the perfect ratio of lemon-custard and melt-in-your-mouth cookie in every bite. Buttery, tart, sweet squares of joy, with the perfect amounts of lemon and sugar without adding too many calories, while the addition of butter AND apple sauce together creates a delicate cookie base that TASTES like a sinful dessert!

How To Make Lemon Bars

Like most of the desserts on this blog of mine, these lemon bars are so easy to make. In fact, you’re 3 easy steps away from the dessert you’ve ever made:

Tips

With the trials and errors (flat-out failures) over the years of trying to get the calories down on desserts, the one main tip I have for this recipe is do not use a granulated sweetener in place of the caster sugar in the lemon filling. The sweetener just creates a ‘layer’ of bitter-tasting sweetener granules in the middle and tastes awful when biting into them. Powdered sweetener works a lot better to cut the calories down even more if you need too, but I have to say that caster sugar (or super fine sugar) works better and melts right through the curd. Then, bake your lemon bars until they are just set and perfectly golden!

Waiting for these to cool down is absolute TORTURE but so worth it! When cutting through them, the lemon sticks to your knife and you just know these are going to be so deliciously gooey and extremely addictive. So, it’s REALLY convenient that they’re only 101 calories. Believe me. Dust on powdered sugar (or sweetener) over the top and be prepared for your minds to be blown into a million pieces.