Vegan Lemon Bars with Silken Tofu

Today I bring you these 7-Ingredient Vegan Lemon Bars which are honestly too easy to make! They also set way faster then many lemon bar recipes out there due to the drained and pureed extra firm silken tofu. If you want something more challenging and/or less sweet, you can try my vegan Spanish bread recipe instead. If you still have a sweet tooth but don’t have as much time, try my vegan compost cookies recipe.

On our first Valentine’s Day in 2011, my boyfriend and I made each other’s favorite desserts in his tiny apartment kitchen. He made me brownies and I made him lemon bars. Now that I’ve been on a vegan diet for over half a decade, it’s time to finally have a tailored vegan lemon bar recipe for our kitchen.

I looked at various recipes for today’s post because I can’t find the old recipe that I used to use. I think it was one on allrecipes but nothing on there today looks familiar. I found this recipe from Preppy Kitchen that isn’t vegan but looked promising.

I tried his recipe while trying to make as few changes as possible and, as usual of course, I wasn’t successful on the first try. It was clearly a good omni recipe so I just had to make this multiple times until I got it right. A lot of tweaking was in order for the version I needed.

Aside from the obvious changes, like using organic sugar instead of conventional and using vegan butter instead of dairy butter, there were other things that I needed to change not only from his recipe but also from my initial baking tests to get the results I wanted. Here are the top 3 takeaways:

• Using a baking pan instead of baking dish is way easier. In Preppy Kitchen’s recipe, he did use a baking pan but both the narrative and recipe called for a baking dish. To me a baking dish is usually the glass casserole ones. I ended up having to purchase a nonstick baking pan because the rounded corners of the glass baking dish didn’t give me the hard, right angled corners that I wanted. Using parchment paper in round-cornered glass baking dishes when baking bars tends to be awkward for me.
• Using drained extra firm silken tofu instead of any undrained, random firmness silken tofu is better for this recipe. The regular silken tofu filling didn’t set at all, even after refrigerating overnight. It wasn’t until I finally tried the extra firm silken tofu and draining it before pureeing it that I found success.
• Moving the lemon zesting and juicing from the prep stage to the shortbread baking stage saves so much time. I found during my earlier tests that zesting and juicing as made the recipe take way longer. In many recipes, I’ve found that trying to do all the prep work at the beginning when some of that stuff could be done during the inactive cooking times is honestly a literal waste of time…time that I can’t afford to lose because, well, hello I’m busy.

So to make the lemon bars, we must absolutely have extra firm silken tofu. Non-gmo tofu products are available in the US and non-gmo soybeans are grown in the US.

That’s a fact.

I used two boxes of these Mori-Nu ones:

I drained the silken tofu in between two plates with the weight of a tortilla press on top. Spoiler: it doesn’t drain much liquid but still good to do.

While that was going on, I also melted my vegan butter. Then I weighed out other ingredients like the flour, sugar and the salt, which I sifted into the mixing bowl of the stand mixer.

When the butter is melted, pour the butter into the mixing bowl with the sifted ingredients. You will mix it all up and get a nice crumby mixture that will be your crust. Then you put the mixture into the baking pan. Oh, by the way, don’t wash or discard the mixing bowl as we’ll be using it for our filling.

My kiddo then flattened it as much as she could to make the crust. Then we put it in the oven to bake at 350 for 26 minutes, rotating 180 degrees halfway.

While the crust baked, I zested half of the lemons and juiced all six afterwards. For this, I prefer to use my hand-held lemon squeezer as opposed to a reamer. Much easier. Also don’t try juicing the lemons first as trying to get zest form juiced lemons would suck.

After we sifted the remaining flour into the mixing bowl from earlier, we then processed the lemon zest and the cane sugar to make a lemon zest sugar. Oh my, this is when it starts to smell good. This newly formed lemon zest sugar is then mixed with the remaining flour in the mixer.

I then take our drained, extra firm silken tofu and process it into a puree.

I then added the puree, vegan egg and lemon juice to the mixing bowl with the flour and lemon zest sugar and stir until it is mixed and looks like this:

Then I poured it into my greased and then parchment-lined baking pan. I didn’t realize my parchment paper was placed so unevenly until I saw this picture. Yikes!

Then into the oven it goes for 26 minutes, rotating halfway through for even cooking. After 26 minutes, I removed it and let it chill on a wire cooling rack for an hour. It was surprisingly firm after only an hour but to be sure, I always chill an extra hour in the fridge.

This is after a combined total of two hours cooling time. I was able to lift one side about 45 degrees and the filling stayed put. It was ready to cut and serve.

This recipe makes 8 large bars, 16 medium bars, 32 small bars and 64 bite-size pieces. I generally don’t like to sprinkle the powdered sugar until serving because it does dissolve and the last thing I want to do is add even more sugar to an already sweet dish.

This recipe has (finally!) been a hit so far with family and friends. It took a few tries and quite a few tweaks but this final end result is worth it.

Here is my 7-Ingredient Vegan Lemon Bars Recipe with Silken Tofu, adapted from Preppy Kitchen

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