Mom needed a dessert for work this week. She works for a furniture store, and the builders are visiting this week.

I’m making cupcakes next weekend for her art show, so wanted to do something different this week. Lemon bars are one of my favorite desserts. And I love cheesecake. So when I saw several pins on Pinterest that combined these to delicious things, I had to try my own version of it!

(I made a double batch of this, so plan accordingly when making it yourself.)

The Crust Ingredients

2 boxes of vanilla cake mix
1 lemon, zested
1 cup of butter, cold and diced

For the crust, I decided to try something we have used for cobblers before—cake mix. Cut together the above ingredients like you would a piecrust. I ended up using my hands towards the end to really combine the butter with the cake mix.

Next time I’ll try more butter and see if that gives a flakier consistency. This batch was fine, but I think it could be a little better. It’s hard to cut through when cold.

Press the crumbly “dough” into the bottom of a 9x13in pan. I lined my pan with foil (shiny side out) and sprayed the bottom for easy clean up and so it was easy to get the bars out. Parchment paper probably would work, too.

Bake the crust for about 15 minutes at 350F.

Lemon Filling Ingredients

3 cups of granulated sugar
1 cup flour
1 lemon, zested
1 cup lemon juice
8 large eggs

I used a stand mixer for this … but wouldn’t have had to. This would be easy enough to mix together by hand. Basically, you just whisk all of the ingredients together—it’s kind of custard-like.

Don’t pour this into the pans until after the crust has cooled and you have the cheesecake layer ready, too.

For this recipe, I pulled inspiration from several recipes and kind of came up with my own measurements and what not. All of the blogs I pulled from will be listed below.

The Cheesecake Ingredients

3 packages of cream cheese
1 cup of granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1½ tsp vanilla
⅓ cup sour cream

You will want a mixer for this. What I did was just dump all of the ingredients into the bowl and beat them together. Don’t do like I did. I got lumpy cheesecake. Beat you cream cheese until smooth and then add the other ingredients. Rookie mistake on my part—and I knew better. Thankfully, as it baked the lumps disappeared. I got lucky.

Once you have both mixtures ready, it’s time to put them in the pans. Now, I think this would be easier as a single batch because you won’t be trying to evenly distribute the mixtures between two pans.

One of the other blogs put the lemon on bottom and the cheesecake on top … and I decided to try it.

So I poured the lemon custard in the pans and then started to scoop the cheesecake on top—and nearly had instant regret. The cheesecake was obviously denser than the custard. And since I was adding the cheesecake one scoop at a time, I was worried the cheesecake would just displace all the lemon custard and leave me with a mess.

But do you know what?

That cheesecake floats.

Weird, right?

Bake all of that for about 30 minutes, until it’s just a little wobbly in the middle. Let it cool for 45 minutes. Chill in the fridge for 2 hours (or overnight) before serving.

They were kind of (really) hard to cut coming straight out of the fridge. I recommend letting them sit out for a little bit before you try to cut them.

Enjoy!