Friday, September 4, 2009

Lemon Bars - Mix or No Mix?

By Jack Johns

After dinner, you must have a dessert. Especially, if you have a family of kids. So, what should you make? I always choose lemon bars...Why not! When made right, lemon bars are delicious. The right combination of fruit, butter, tart and sweet. Also, lemon bars are really easy to make.

You definitely need to have a quick recipe for lemon bars. I don't always feel like cooking after making dinner. There are some mixtures you can buy from the grocery store. There are a lot of mixtures to choose from. I chose Krusteaz. I have been using their other mixes for some time now and thought i'd give it a try. Not to mention it is only $2 for the mix. After making dinner, I flipped the box over and read through the ingredient list and the directions.

All I needed to make these lemon bars were: square pan, non-stick spray, 1/2 cup water, 3 eggs and powdered sugar. Seems pretty easy and quick. Surprisingly to make lemon bars from scratch you just need a couple more ingredients, so it may be a better idea, especially from a taste perspective, to make lemon bars from scratch, but I will get to that later in the article, however.

Next step was to preheat my oven. I opened the mix and poured it into my sprayed pan. Making the crust is very easy...all you need to do to make the sweet, buttery shortbread crust is press the mix firmly into the pan and bake it for about 8 minutes. For the filling, you mix the contents of the filling packet with 1/2 cup water and 3 eggs and whisk it together. After the crust has baked, pour the prepared filling into the pan then bake for the prescribed time. After it has baked, dust with powdered sugar, if you desire.

The flavor was pretty good, but it still tasted like it came from a box. The baked lemon filling is thick, rich and packs a tart punch. If you dust your dessert with powdered sugar, it will temper the tartness a little bit with a fleeting sweetness. The crust, which is my favorite part, is slightly sweet and buttery and melts in your mouth.

Although, this lemon bar mix was cheap, I would not recommend it for many reasons. It's easy and I'd prefer to make lemon bars from scratch. The taste is better and the time it takes to make lemon bars from scratch is not that more.

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