Meyer Lemon Bars (Secret Recipe Club)

It's Secret Recipe Club reveal day once again and we were assigned Life's Simple Pleasures, a beautiful blog that is completely overflowing with recipes for bars, breads, cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, and snacks, as well as a few savory dishes. We scrolled our way down the recipe list trying hard to decide what to make. It wasn't easy! Should we try to make challah bread? How about a fallen souffle chocolate torte - doesn't that sound amazing?!?!? Or candied bacon chocolate chip cookies? Um, yum!!! All of these are most assuredly on our to-do list. 

What forced our final decision for this month, though, was that we have made two batches of Meyer lemon curd in the last couple of weeks and we have been looking for something way with which to use it when we spotted LSP's lemon bars. They looked so lovely and reminded us so much of sunshine and springtime that we just had to go with them. 

We made them to take to our neighbors' St. Patrick's Day dinner so we gave them a little Irish twist by tinting some powdered sugar green with green food coloring and making shamrock decorations on them. Chris finnagled a cookie cutter/aluminum foil thingie to make that work. He's a good problem solver!

Although we didn't use the lemon topping part of the recipe (since we used our lemon curd instead), the crust was to die for. Flaky, tender and buttery indeed. They were sunny bites of citrus heaven. Now if spring would just get here already, we'd be all set!

Meyer Lemon Bars

recipe from Life's Simple Pleasures

Ingredients:

2 cups unsalted butter, softened

4 cups all purpose flour

1 cup powdered sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons grated lemon zest

1/2 cup Meyer lemon curd

additional powdered sugar for garnish
green food coloring (if desired)

In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and powdered sugar. Add salt, lemon zest and flour; mix only until combined and crumbly. Spread dough evenly in a 12x18-inch sheet pan. Using a piece of wax paper, press down down as flat as possible. Refrigerate dough for 30 minutes. Heat oven to 350 and bake crust for 20 minutes or until golden brown. Set aside to cool. Spread lemon curd evenly over crust and return to oven. Bake additional 15 minutes. Dust with powdered sugar and refrigerate 1 hour to set. Cut and serve.