The Easy Store-Bought Shortcut For Delicious Lemon Bars

Lemon bars are one of those time-honored culinary gems for which the preparation feels cast in stone. For most standard recipes, before you layer on that tangy and tantalizing lemon curd, you'll make a shortbread crust from scratch. That means purchasing, weighing, and mixing the ingredients before baking the dough into a base for your bars. While this may not be the most complicated of crust recipes, it's still a step standing between you and citrusy satisfaction when the craving strikes.

Fortunately, there's a store-bought ingredient that'll have you serving up these tart squares in record time — and that's packaged sugar cookie dough. By converting this go-to product into your crust, you can simplify the process of making your classic lemon bars considerably, saving yourself time, energy, and the investment in multiple ingredients.

Additionally, this dough adds a little something on the flavor front that you may not have known you were missing in your lemon bars — a sweet contrast to the zippy filling, resulting in a sweet-tart balance of flavors. And if you're happy with how this little lemon bar twist turns out, you can find inspiration for other sweet treats, too.

To create these lemon sugar cookie bars, you can go for the store-bought cookie dough that's pre-cut into cookie shapes or the roll version. Either way, you'll want to press your dough pieces into your baking dish in an even layer (making sure to merge the pieces into one continuous sheet), which you can do by hand. From there, you'll pre-bake the dough — aiming for a lighter golden color than you might for a finished cookie since you'll be baking it again and don't want a dry, crumbly base. Then simply pour your lemon mixture over the sweet crust and finish the bars per your usual recipe.

This sugar cookie-lemon combo is unarguably delicious, but this trick opens up other possibilities, too. Try a peanut butter cookie dough with strawberry curd for a PB&J-inspired treat or a double chocolate dough as the crust for an orange bar recipe. An embellishment like fresh mint adds complementary flavor and aroma along with a pop of color, while a sprinkle of salty nuts that you can toast perfectly in the microwave offers a crunchy contrast. The bottom line is that with this trick in mind, you may never see the base of your bars the same way again.