Vegan lemon bars

These vegan lemon bars are easy to make, delicious, and full of lemon flavor thanks to a finger-licking vegan lemon curd.

This is a colorful and fun dessert recipe, perfect to make for your family and friends.

Instructions

Vegan shortcrust pastry

Preheat the oven to 350F or 180C.

Line the baking pan with parchment paper. I’m using a squared 10 by 10 inches or 25 by 25 cm pan, but a round one of 10 inches or 26 centimeters in diameter is also totally fine. 

What’s important is to let some of the parchment paper go over the edges of the pan so that it will be easier to remove the pie from it once baked.

To a bowl, add ¼ cup or 50 grams of sugar, 3 tablespoons or 45 grams of water, 3 tablespoons or 40 grams of vegetable oil, and the grated zest of one lemon.

Mix with a spatula to combine the ingredients, then sift in 1⅓ cups or 200 grams of all-purpose flour, and 1 teaspoon or 5 grams of baking powder.

We mix with a spatula till the flour absorbs the liquids, then with our hands, we knead the dough for just a minute. We can do this in the bowl since we really just have to bring the ingredients together. 

For this pie crust, we don’t want to knead the dough too much because we don’t want to develop the gluten that would make our pie crust less crumbly and too compact.

Next, we transfer the dough into the baking pan and compress it with our hands to create a base layer of dough, making sure the dough sticks together.

Now make some holes with a fork, then bake in the oven at 350F or 180C for 15 minutes.

Take out of the oven and let cool for 10 minutes before adding the lemon curd on top. Do not turn off your oven, as we’ll need it again in a minute.

Vegan lemon curd

So, while the pie crust cools down, we can make the lemon curd.

The secret to great lemon curd is, well, good lemons, or better, their peel and juice. So as a first step, remove the peel from one lemon and add it to a medium saucepan.

Then take 3 medium-size lemons, you can reuse the zested lemon and the peeled lemon, cut them in half, and squeeze their juice.

You’ll need ⅓ cup or 80 grams of lemon juice. Pass it through a sieve and into a small container and set aside. 

Filtering the lemon with a sieve is important because we don’t want any lemon pieces or seeds in our lemon curd.

Now to the medium saucepan, add 2 cups or 500 grams of plant milk of your choice, we use rice milk, ½ cup or 100 grams of sugar, we use cane sugar, and ½ cup or 60 grams of cornstarch to help the lemon curd thicken. 

Then if we want to give it some yellow color, we can add a pinch of turmeric powder.

Whisk to remove all lumps, then bring onto medium heat and keep stirring till the curd thickens up. 

Remove the lemon peel, then add the lemon juice and keep stirring for another minute until the lemon juice is fully absorbed by the custard. And here you go, that’s our vegan lemon curd and It’s absolutely incredible!

Lemon bars

The final step in making our vegan lemon bars is to pour the lemon curd onto the baked crust and level it off with a spatula.

Bake in the oven at 350F or 180C for another 15 minutes then let cool down for about an hour before taking it out of the pan.

Variations

Vegan lemon bars can be easily turned into a vegan lemon tart with a crunchy base,