Why are these lemon bars different from all others? We got double the lemon flavor! I love the fragrance and ZING of lemon zest so much, I even put it in the crust. Everyone will enjoy these bars. Perfect for dessert or as a snack, even as a breakfast! (Come on, it’s Passover!)
When lining the pan, be sure to cut enough foil or parchment to have it overhang the pan. That way, you can pull the whole batch out of the pan, and when cooled, slice and serve the bars easily. I’ve thought of everything here! Enjoy!
Note: This recipe has been updated in 2017 taking into account some of the comments and having been retested, it is now better than ever. Take your Passover dessert-making to new heights with lemon bars. These tasty treats add zing to dessert and snack time.
Passover Lemon Bars
Servings
Ingredients
- 7 tablespoons unsalted melted butter
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1 vanilla bean scraped or 2 teaspoons extract
- ¼ teaspoon kosher or sea salt
- ½ cup finely ground almonds
- ½ cup matzo cake meal
- Zest from 1 lemon preferably from an organic lemon
- 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
- 3 tablespoons potato starch
- 3 large eggs
- Finely grated zest from 2 lemons (preferably from organic lemons)
- ½ cup fresh lemon juice from about 2 – 3 medium lemons
- Pinch of kosher or sea salt
- 1 vanilla bean scraped or 2 teaspoons extract
- 2 – 3 tablespoons powdered sugar for dusting (optional)
Instructions
For the crust:
- Preheat oven to 350°F. Line an 8- x 8-inch baking dish with parchment paper or foil. Grease the parchment or foil.
- Heat butter until hot. Add sugar, vanilla, salt, almonds, cake meal, and lemon zest. Stir just to combine. Transfer crust to lined pan and press into the pan.
- Bake at 350°F until lightly browned, about 20 to 25 minutes. Set aside.
For the filling:
- Decrease oven to 300°F.
- Whisk together sugar, starch, eggs, zest, juice, salt, and vanilla until well combined.
- Gently pour filling into baked crust. Bake the bars for 20 to 25 minutes until the center is no longer jiggly.
- Cool completely before garnishing with powdered sugar.
I made these exactly according to the recipe, and they were so awful I had to throw them away. The crust was fine, but the lemon topping had a gummy layer on the surface, and then oozed out the sides when I cut the bars. Lots of wasted time and ingredients. Such a disappointment
just made these and the filling went under the crust. I just read in another recipe that it is better to pour the filling on when the crust just finishes baking and is still hot, so I will try that next time, because regardless of how these look they taste great
The taste is amazing! I brought the to an event and received rave reviews. Like mentioned earlier, the crust was kind of soggy, so I’ll try to fix that for next time.
Didn’t love my taste of the crust when I was patting it into the pan but the filling is AMAZING! I’m sure once it’s all baked it will be wonderful. Baked them today and will freeze them for a month until Passover. Thank you
B’Tayavon!!! Moadim L’Simcha
In 85-90%of the Pesach observant families in Israel, dairy meals aren’t served. A morning brunch after returning from morning services are fried Matza (oil not butter) some hard boiled or fried eggs, light oil. To properly honor the holiday, meat / chicken is served at these meals. PARVE items are served and not items containing dairy products. All home baked goods are PARVE . If you look at the baked good , cookies and the such on store shelves in Israel they are for the most part PARVE. If you’re well off enough to have extra room & the money, you have a separate dairy oven. To start making Dairy items once your oven has been used to make roasts, chicken and whatever, its a tedious process to changeover to making the over neutral and then making it DAIRY and then back to meat. It’s only 8 days the whole holiday.
So use Pesach parve margarine instead of butter.
Or as I do, go dairy-vegetarian all year.
Thank you for your comment. Don’t know your food science background but ‘margarine’ and parve margarine is no better. Why should I subject my body to chemicals that will wreak havoc on my digestive system just to satisfy my palate for a simple meal. Please do some reading on how ‘margarine’ be it parve or dairy is produced and you will never use it ever again. I recommend olive oil as it is the purest and the least processed of the food oils on the market. It is also KP. Do you really want to eat products with butter with people’s history of hypertension and elevated cholesterol. A Happy Kosher Passover!! Remember, Passover is ONLY 8 days not a month.
Jamie Geller has a recipe for Pareve lemon bars on this site that calls for olive oil in the crust. The filling has a lot of sugar, so I plan to use her crust, and the filling from this recipe. A gut moed.
B’Tayavon. Jaime loves using olive oil* which is much healthier than any of the other oils if you’re into chemistry. Moadim L’Simcha [*Colavita is one of her main sponsors & it is a good olive oil]
Where in the Bible/Torah does it state that?
Can these bars be frozen?
Hi! Did anyone try this with gf matza meal or substitute anything else to make gluten free?
I used gf matzoh meal. The taste was great, just wish the crust set up better.
Thanks for asking, we did modify it and retested it and it is a good recipe now. Would love for you to try it and come back and let us know how it worked for you.
i would like to make this recipe this year, but i am wondering if it has been modified since troubles folks had last year?
Hazelnuts would be good
My husband is allergic to almonds. Is there another nut I can substitute for the ground almonds?
I am so sorry, I am not sure what went wrong with this recipe we are working to update it now.
Giving it a few extra minutes in the oven but the “filling” is still total liquid. Is there a typo? Was it supposed to be a lot more than 1/4 cup potato starch?
Oy! The one time I don’t read comments, I sure wish I had. These looked nothing like the picture, as others have said, and they didn’t set properly. Not enough filling for the crust. What a waste of good ingredients! I’m also an experienced cook and baker; had planned to take these to an interfaith Seder tomorrow. I’m glad I made them ahead of time. Not sure what I’ll do with the lemon mush; probably toss it.
sorry to hear that! I will do the recipe myself this holiday and based upon your experience, will get back to you with the results.
Chag Sameach!
I’ve now tried this recipe two days in a row- once with the nut crust and once with the macaroon crust….. both times the lemon seeped through the bottom! First time, I thought it was totally me…… second time, yeah not so much. Today I made sure I checked, double checked, Triple checked the recipe and measurements…. thinking this one is a fail.
In my standared lemon bars I do 2 eggs and a yolk. My ingredients are different though. If lemon bar is weeping through crust, maybe a thicker crust. Also try an extra yolk. It will make the bar more dense/chewy.
I used a 9×9 pan and simmered the filing for 10 minutes over a double boiler before baking. It turned out great
I just made this recipe and followed the directions perfectly (April 2017). The recipe apparently was improved. Well, don’t bother! The crust doesn’t hold the lemon custard. I had to bake it for 30 mins to firm up the lemon filling. It is a mush once I got it off the foil. I used the ground nuts for the crust. Used potato starch in the filling. I will pass it off as a lemon nut pudding next to my sponge cake. FYI, I am an experience cook in the kitchen.
I am so sorry Marcy, several people as you can see have enJOYed the recipe and some have had issues but never what you describe. I will consult with some baker bloggers and see if anyone has any suggestions they can post.
So upset. This recipe was a total flop. I followed the measurements exactly for the filling and the paste has the consistency of water, not a paste. Huge disappointment A big waste of time passover eve morning and I got up early to make these 🙁
I tried this recipe, the filling was excellent, but the crust too thin. I couldn’t get it out of the pan. I have a very good non-stick pan, and might have been better off with that. I finally got most of it, attached to the foil, out of the pan. I put it in the freezer, then was able to peel off the foil. I cut smaller pieces, and had plenty of them. I serve assorted cookies and squares for dessert, so even though I have 30 people, I think it will be fine.
I made (a slightly modified version of) this recipe this pesach and everyone loved it so much that I’ve adopted and modified it for after pesach. For the crust, I bought kosher for pesach Graham crackers (new this year) which I ground up in my cuisinart and then added melted margarine to, just enough to make it stick together. I then smushed the mixture into a pan – and this is key- baked it for 10-15 minutes on 350 to harden it so it wouldn’t mix with the lemon filling. Then I made 1 and a half times the lemon filling of this recipe, for he topping in a 9×13 pan. It was so delicious! After pesach, I used the same recipe just used real Graham crackers instead. I found that 2 packets of crushed Graham crackers with 1 3/4 sticks of melted margarine was a good amount of crust for the 9×13 pan.
This was an absolute fail. I precooked the crust and the lemon mixture just completely seeped into it. Now I have to come up with something new for Pesach tonight. What a waste!
i have tried them two years in a row. They taste delicious but look awful. Very flimsy. I had to serve them in a bowl!
mine also broke apart when I tried to get them out of the pan. I think spraying the pan with PAM might help as well as pre-baking thr crust before adding the filling. Has anyone tried using cake flour instead of the macaroons? If yes, how much did you use?
The same thing as Sherry happened to mine! I thought it was kind of strange. I found these to be way to coconutty and not lemony enough. I’m thinking I’ll save lemon bars for during the year and come up with another fun dessert next Pesach.
hi my daughter sent me an article from the NYTimes about 8 or 9 years ago stating by a rabbinical group that baking powder and baking soda are fine. They said they were concerned about foods, not chemicals
It sounds to me like you need to pat down the crust more. You can wet you hands a little so that the crust doesn’t stick to your hands but just a bit of water. You don’t want them wet.
Just like Sherry, mine looked nothing like the picture. My topping also sunk to the bottom and the crust rose to the top, except for a thin “skin” from the lemon topping that sat on the very top. They were really flimsy, although they tasted good. I’m going to try and refrigerate them so they hold their form a bit better. I patted down the crust quite a bit (completely squashed/compressed) and I also stuck the crust in the heated oven for 3 minutes to try and get it to set. Bummer that I don’t have time to make another batch before seder… thoughts?
Same thing happened to me. I won’t do these again.
I just made the passover lemon bars. They look nothing like the picture. Help – the filling sunk to the bottom and the crust came to the top. It made them very hard to cut because the lemon filling was on the bottom. What should I do to correct this and have them look like they are suppose too!!!! They taste good but do not look good and I had to ref rig over night so I could even cut them.
I would also like a sub for crust
These were amazing! I used a mixture of regular and cookies and cream macaroons (the new manischewitz line of macaroons are delicious – specifically cookies and cream and mint choc chip). I also baked the crust for a bit first because the first time I made them they fell apart a little.
is there anything else that can be used as a crust? can’t stand macaroons
According to the Lebovicher meshgiach (supervisor of kashruth):
“Personally, I have not seen yet the Kosher for Passover baking powder, but I see no reason why even the very observant should not use it. After all, it is 101% Kosher for Passover. It is the traditionalist who would not use it. There are two kinds of traditionalists: 1) The one who does not use any manufactured products, although some have exceptions like wine, matzoh and salt. Others more exceptions others less. 2) The one who would not use any product on Passover that his mother and grand mother did not use, including tomatoes). I can go on and on, but for now I will end here.”
The following are the kosher for Passover baking powder and soda, as listed in the “OU Guide to Kosher for Passover Foods”:
ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda
GEFEN Baking Powder and Baking Soda (Kenover Marketing Corp. Brooklyn, NY (Its the same company as Kedem wine)
V.I.P. MASTER Baking Powder
Not sure, I might try leaving it out. The way this Honey Tart is made maybe – http://www.joyofkosher.com/recipe/honey-nut-tart/
I have only been cooking Kosher for 4 years now, but my Rabbi (and father-in-law) assures me that ANY type of leavening is un-kosher for Passover. Any idea what I can use other than chemical leaveners?