Pink Lemonade Bars

To celebrate Labor Day, I went on a huge baking spree. I spent the whole day making delicious dishes and desserts in the kitchen. My favorite creation was a dessert, raspberry lemon (pink lemonade) bars, from one of my favorite bloggers, Smitten Kitchen. I knew I had to post these on here. The recipe is linked above, and I hope you enjoy the pictures below illustrating some of the baking process with my own personal notes.

1. I used a blender to puree the raspberries because I don’t have a food processor. Quick side note- You can also make the dough by hand, no food processor needed. Sieving out the seeds was easy, just make sure you have a fine enough sieve. Oh, and that extra raspberry sauce, don’t even think of throwing that out! I put mine on some Greek yogurt, and I can only imagine how heavenly it would be on ice cream.

2. You mix a few tablespoons of this raspberry puree with the lemon bar liquid.

3. Don’t forget to precook your crust before adding the filling! I suggest making the crust first, and letting it bake/cool while you puree the raspberries and prepare the filling. The cooling step is important because you are pouring in an egg mixture.

4. Time to bake. Once the filling is set and the crust looks done, take the bars out of the oven and let them sit until they are completely cooled. I left them in the pan for a while, and when I thought the bars could withstand some movement, I used the parchment to pull them out of the pan and placed them on a cooling rack.

5. While the bars are baking/cooling, you can take some time to do this:

6. Once cooled, I cut out 16 bars and sprinkled them with powdered sugar. I didn’t have a sugar duster, but sprinkling with my fingers seemed to work just fine.

7. I shared some with friends, ate a few to make sure they were acceptable ;) , and I froze some for my mom. These do keep in the freezer, just make sure you take them out in time to return to room temp before eating. Alternatively, if you are like me, when my mom makes lemon bars around Christmas I sneak frozen ones of the freezer and eat them cold. So share, eat and/or package how you please, and most of all ENJOY!