What could be better than summer dessert bars that taste like an orange pastry?
If you are someone who likes fruity desserts and summer dessert bars, and especially things with citrus in them, you will love these!
Similar to lemon bars, orange bars also called orange dream bars, are the perfect treat to have during the summer.
They taste fresh and light and will have you going back to grab little bites until you have eaten a whole piece.
This post is all about the best summer dessert bars: orange bars.
I hadn’t known there was another variation to lemon bars until recently and decided to give them a try because I had some oranges lying around. Let’s just say, I made a good decision.
The recipe is actually quite simple, and there aren’t as many dirty dishes at the end as you might think. You can contain your materials to just a couple of utensils and bowls, which helps to make an easier clean up.
These have already been taste-tested by many friends, and they have all approved and gone back for more.
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Citrus-flavored desserts aren’t for everyone either, but these orange bars are definitely worth a try, even if they don’t have chocolate, a common go-to flavor for many.
This recipe was made by Crazy For Crust, so go check out all of the helpful tips that they have set up to make this baking process easier!
These orange bars turned out perfect and were super sweet and delicious. I think if I were to not have been as experienced in the world of baking, I would still be able to make this recipe with relative ease.
As long as you focus on one thing at a time, you will be able to manage the different moving pieces. If you’ve never done a recipe like this before, it can be slightly stressful to balance making the base, then the filling, and cleaning up at the same time.
If you can organize your space and have a clear idea of what you need to do, all will go over smoothly.
Before we even get to the ingredients, you will want to preheat the oven to 350 degrees and prepare a 9 x 13-inch pan with some sort of non-stick spray.
Starting off with the ingredients for the base shortbread, you will need:
1 cup of butter (2 sticks)
1 cup of confectioner’s sugar
2 cups of flour
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First, in a stand mixer or with a hand mixer, mix the butter until creamy. For this step, you may want to leave the butter out for a little bit before you put it in the mixer.
It can be extremely difficult to try and get cold, hard butter out of the whisks or mixing hands. Even with something like a spoon, it is incredibly difficult and somewhat messy to try and peel out the butter that has reformed.
The butter doesn’t have to be completely room temperature, but as long as it sits out for 5 to 10 minutes beforehand, that should be enough time to let it soften just a little bit so it’s not as hard to work with.
After the butter has been creamed, add in the sugar and flour and continue to mix together until some sort of dough forms.
While the word dough may already have some implications as something that has taken a solid form and may be one piece, just know that the dough for the shortbread will look somewhat different.
It will be drier because there is no wet ingredient and very crumbly. More like a crumbled cookie than an actual dough like cookie dough.
Once you have achieved that consistency, pour it into a 9 x 13-inch glass pan and press the dough down so it is even and there is not so much air between the crumbs that are dough.
Then, put into the oven. For a regular oven, the recipe recommends keeping it in the oven for about 18 minutes. I have a convection oven, so I only needed to put it in for 13 and a half minutes.
You will know the dough is ready when the surface is slightly golden brown but doesn’t look completely cooked through. It will also smell really good.
So while the shortbread is baking, you can turn to the orange filling. You may or may not have enough time to finish this while the timer is going, it just depends on how fast you can get it done.
I ended up needing one to two more minutes after the timer went off to finish the filling before I was ready to put them together.
For the orange filling, you will need:
½ cup of orange juice
Zest of 1 orange
1 tsp of orange extract
1 ½ cups of granulated sugar
¼ cup of flour
½ tsp of baking powder
4 large eggs
Now this part was super easy, I just didn’t think to prepare the orange zest before putting everything together so it took some time to get all of the zest where it needed to go.
As soon as you prepare the ingredients, you can throw everything into the blender. All at once. No sectioning is necessary.
You may want to be careful with the granulated sugar because if you wait too long after adding it to the blender, it will sink to the bottom and be hard for the blender to pick back up.
If this is the case, get a spoon or some other utensil try to mix everything up, and then blend immediately to get the ingredients moving.
The filling should be very liquidy, and you can pour it right onto the shortbread once it comes out of the oven.
Be careful once you pick the pan back up because the filling is very easy to move and may spill over with sudden jolts.
Make sure it stays in the oven for 20-23 minutes, with my convection oven, it took exactly 21 minutes. Check it every once in a while, and you can take it out once the top has become structured and solid.
You may be asking, what does that mean? This is how you check whether or not your orange bars are done!
With both hands, gently shake the pan and watch the middle of the orange bars, if the middle still looks like it jiggles, then they still need to bake. If they do not jiggle and the top stays solid, then they are ready to take out of the oven.
Once they’re out, make sure they cool completely before adding any powdered sugar on top. This part does take a while, so you may want to leave aside around 20 minutes to ensure that they are fully cool.
If you are making this for the next day, don’t even add powdered sugar yet, because overnight it will start to melt into the orange bar and won’t look as nice the next day. You can add powdered sugar when you are ready to serve.
For storage, you can leave them at room temperature or if you like having the orange bars cool, you can put them in the refrigerator.
There is also the other option to freeze them if you don’t feel like you will be able to finish them or want to save them for farther down the road. In this case, put them in the freezer, and then when you want to eat them, let them defrost on the counter or in the refrigerator.
For now, I just have them on the counter because they won’t last long in my house.
This recipe is so much fun and the perfect blend of easy while also feeling advanced because of how many steps there are and moving pieces like baking the shortbread and making the orange filling at the same time.
It only took me about 45 minutes from start to finish not counting the time it took for the orange bars to cool. But even then, the entire process was only around an hour and there was enough time to wash dishes in between.
When the bars were cooling, I even had enough time to get some other work done so there was a lot of initial mixing of ingredients but after things started to get in the oven it was super easy to go do other things and then just come back and check on it.
These orange bars are my favorite summer dessert bars because they are so light and fresh and they just give off that summer vibe.
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If you have a party coming up or a get-together and you have an hour, I highly recommend trying out this recipe.
Although this dessert doesn’t have any chocolate in it, it is still pretty sweet and tastes amazing. Even if you aren’t specifically looking for summer dessert bars, and are just looking for something dessert-related for the summer, this is a great recipe to add to your roster.