For Thursday Tries this week, I made Lemon Bars from Preppy Kitchen. I won’t provide the whole recipe breakdown, because you can find all the details from the recipe link. I’ve been following Preppy Kitchen for years now on Youtube, and surprisingly – I never made any of his recipes! I have down a list of few recipe I want to attempt, but just never got around to it.
Few things to note about Preppy Kitchen’s website:
1. I love how he has photos of everything and every step of the way. That makes it so easy to follow and know what to expect.
2. To be honest, I usually skip the the recipe part on everyone’s blog because I’m not a huge fan of reading a “background” story. I decided to read everything though on this recipe, since I knew I was going to write a blog post on it and I’m surprised – there weren’t any background stories, but actual cooking tips which I am all about.
3. My favorite part – the recipe contains both imperial and metric units. The United States and a few other countries uses the imperial system, and the rest of the world uses the metric system. For example, the imperial system uses cooking measurements such as cups, pound, and ounces. While the metric system uses liters and grams. For more information, you can find more details on this website.
In my opinion, I think providing two different units is a nice touch, especially in baking recipes. This is because if the author is using the metric units to bake on their end, they will “calculate” and convert that number into imperial units. According to this link, 1 cup of dry ingredients is equal to 128 grams. Sometimes Most times, it really doesn’t equal to that. This is why I bought a kitchen scale and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys baking.
One thing I realize is when a recipe calls for juice or zest, always buy more! It’s better safe than sorry – unless you don’t mind going to the grocery store very last minute. This recipe calls for 3 tablespoon of lemons, which he states it’ll be about 3 lemons. Mine took 4 lemons to make 3 tablespoon of zest, and these were large lemons! Granted, I am not the best zester so I have some spots where I missed.
If you’re looking for a zester, this is the one I have! Highly recommend!
Fun fact: I made key lime pie a while back, and the recipe says it’ll take about 20 limes… so I bought 25.
I only ended up using 10 limes >.<
There are a few kitchen items that I believe are super underrated, but they’re my kitchen staples. One of them is this lemon/lime juicer! Do yourself a favor and anytime you shop at Ross, TJ Max, Marshalls, or Homegoods – keep an eye out for one! I got mine for $7 at Ross, but this exact one is usually sold for $20-$30 at other stores! If you can’t find one and must get one now – here is a link from Amazon.
As the recipe states, line your baking dish! I think that’s very important when making this as the filling is very sticky and it would be a disaster taking out of the baking dish if you didn’t. I used parchment paper and cut out the corners so you won’t have that awkward corner where the parchment paper is crumbled together. Mine isn’t a good representation, but here’s a quick video of how to do that.
A very random photo of our Kenmore double oven from the 1950-1970s? We are soon tearing out this kitchen for remodel and will be removing this double oven. Wanted to take this photo for memory 🙂 I honestly love this oven. It’s not the best as it takes a while to pre-heat, but it gets the job done and I love this “vintage” look!
Okay, back to the lemon bars. Final thoughts:
I was not a huge fan of these lemon bars. They were way too sweet and sticky for my liking. I ate half of one bar, and that was enough for me. I will not be indulging on these. I’ll have to rate this a 3/10. Easy recipe, especially if you have all the right kitchen tools! I appreciate how I only used one mixing bowl as well and you can make the second part (filling) while the crust was baking.
For P, he likes these! I did warn him how sticky and sweet these were, and he thought he wouldn’t like them… but he is enjoying them more than he thought he would base on my description. Hehe. P rates this a 6.5/10 and would like to let the world know that it has potential.
I definitely do love the taste of sweet and sour together, and would like to come up with my own recipe for lemon bars. I usually make about 2-3 recipes of a dish (baking or cooking) from different authors before I come up with my own recipe base on my liking. Please let me know down in the comments below if there’s another Lemon Bar recipe I should try or any recipe you like me to try!
Thank you so much for spending time on my blog, and I’ll see you next time!
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