Cake Mix Lemon Bars |Cooking With Amanda

Do you know what no one ever warns you about before you have a baby?

All the years of horrible television that lies ahead of you.

People warn you about the sleep – "get all you can now!!" - which is a ridiculous notion. There is absolutely no amount of sleep that will ever prepare you for an infant. Truth be told, it would be more helpful to advise you to practice functioning on as LITTLE sleep as humanly possible. Kind of like training for a marathon, but it's a marathon of not sleeping, ever.

The television children watch is absolutely terrible. There are songs that manage to be both catchy and horribly grating at the same time. Like if I catch myself singing the "Everybody Outside" song from Bubble Guppies one more time, I might end up on the floor, crying and rocking myself and muttering complete nonsense. It's complete insanity, the way this stuff worms its way into the very core of your brain.

It gets no better as they get older. My 11-year-old has graduated to Big Kid Cartoons, which are their own special brand of awful. For some reason, someone is always screaming and crying on these cartoons. I'm always running into the room looking for the crying baby and then hurling a throw pillow across the room when I find out it's just that dang cartoon.

And throw pillows aren't something that should be thrown around. They don't give those things away. Who even makes up throw pillow prices? We all need to put our foot down and make something happen with that.

I realize that the easy solution would just be not to let the kiddos watch their shows. My husband has proposed that to me a time or fifty-seven, bless his naïve, problem-solving heart. Trust me – the cartoons are the lesser of two evils. The other evil being them clinging to your legs, asking all the questions, wanting all the snacks, and possibly even expecting you to play Memory or (Lord, help me) Candyland.

Brace yourselves, new mamas. It's a long road.

When that happens, these lemon bars are just the thing for your tired, frazzled mind. They are SO easy to whip up and the tart, chewy flavor is absolutely perfect. Stash a few in the fridge behind the broccoli. No one will ever know.

Print Save

Cake Mix Lemon Bars Recipe

Embed

Ingredients

1 box lemon cake mix, roughly 18 ounces
1 3.4 oz box instant lemon pudding
2 large eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons lemon juice

For the Glaze:

2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup powdered sugar, or more, to taste

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°F. Spray bottom only of an 8x8 pan with cooking spray and set aside.
In the bowl of your mixer, beat cake mix, pudding mix, eggs, oil and lemon juice until a dough forms. Press the dough evenly into the bottom of your pan.
Bake for about 15 minutes or so -- until the edges are barely golden and the bars are puffy and firm on top. Remove from oven and let cool.

For the Glaze: