These easy lemon cream cheese bars are one of our new favorite desserts! Lemon-y and creamy cheesecake filling sits between a buttery crescent roll dough layer, making for a refreshingly sweet dessert.
Creamy Lemon Cream Cheese Bars
Who loves a delicious dessert that’s ridiculously easy to make? We do! And you will too after one bite of these mouth-watering lemon cream cheese bars. This is a no-fuss, low-effort, easy dessert that tastes so good, you’d guess it’s gourmet.
Unlike traditional lemon bars, this recipe has a cream cheese filling that goes perfectly with the lemon flavor. Basically, it’s a match made in dessert heaven!
If you love lemon bars as much as we do, you’ll love our classic lemon bars and gluten-free lemon bars on our sister site, Fit Foodie Finds.
make ahead cream cheese bars!
These easy lemon bars are great for making ahead as meal prep. Just wrap each one up individually in plastic wrap, store it in the fridge, and you’ll have a delicious treat every day of the week.
Recipe Ingredients
This lemon cream cheese bars recipe uses simple ingredients that can easily be found at your local grocery store or sitting in your pantry.
It really doesn’t require much to make these lemon bars amazing, so you mind as well go for it! The following is all that you need to make this easy recipe:
- crescent roll dough
- cream cheese
- powdered sugar
- granulated sugar
- lemon
- vanilla extract
- butter
How to Make Lemon Cream Cheese Bars
Ready to try out one of the BEST lemon recipes? Here’s how to make delicious lemon cream cheese bars.
PREHEAT OVEN
Preheat the oven to 350°F and grease your casserole dish with 1 tablespoon of butter.
PREP THE DOUGH
Open one tube of crescent rolls. Cover and flatten the dough to the bottom of the casserole dish, using your fingers to crimp together the seams.
MIX THE FILLING
In a large bowl, use a hand mixer to mix the cream cheese, powdered sugar, granulated sugar, lemon zest, lemon juice, and vanilla until combined.
ASSEMBLE YOUR LEMON BARS
Transfer your cream cheese mixture onto the top of the crescent roll dough in the casserole dish. Spread it evenly until the dough is completely covered. Then, cover the cream cheese mixture with your second tube of crescent rolls, pinching together the seams as you did the first time.
Next, melt the remaining butter and brush it on top of the crescent roll dough. Top it off by sprinkling on your remaining sugar.
BAKE & REFRIGERATE
Now it’s time to bake! Place your cream cheese lemon bar in the oven and bake for 30 minutes. Once finished baking, refrigerate it for at least 2 hours before slicing and serving. Enjoy!
Storage
If by some miracle, you have creamy lemon bars left over, then you should store them in the fridge.
Just place the bars in an airtight container if you’ve already sliced them into squares. Otherwise, you could cover the pan you cooked them in with foil and store them for later.
To Freeze Lemon Bars
Yes. However, we advise that you only freeze them if you’re using full-fat cream cheese. You can either freeze the whole thing—pan and all—in plastic wrap and add foil on top to ensure the bars don’t get freezer burn. This will hold up for about a month.
To freeze individual slices of your lemon bars: wrap in plastic wrap and put them in an airtight, freezer-safe container. This way, you can pop one out to thaw whenever you’re craving a slice!
To thaw your lemon bars, place them in the refrigerator overnight and cut them into slices if needed, making sure to eat them within two days.
More Cheesecake Bars
Looking for more cheesecake bars? Our sister site, Fit Foodie Finds has some incredible options, including:
- Blueberry Cheesecake Bars
- Lemon Vegan Cheesecake Bars
- Chocolate Chai Greek Yogurt Cheesecake Bars
- Pumpkin Cheesecake Bars
Lemon Cream Cheese Bars
Ingredients
- 2 8 oz. crescent roll tubes
- 16 oz. cream cheese softened
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- ½ cup granulated sugar divided
- 2 large lemons zest, and juice (~⅔ cup juice and 2-3 tablespoons zest)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 4 tablespoons unsalted butter divided
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350℉.
- Grease a 9×13-inch casserole dish with 1 tablespoon of butter.
- Open one tube of crescent rolls and cover the bottom of the casserole dish with the flattened dough. Use your fingers to crimp together the seams that are in the dough. Set aside.
- Place the cream cheese, powdered sugar, ¼ cup sugar, zest, lemon juice, and vanilla into a large bowl. Using a hand mixer, mix until well combined.
- Transfer the cream cheese mixture onto the top of the crescent roll dough in the casserole dish and evenly spread it out.
- Next, cover the cream cheese mixture with the second tube of crescent rolls. Lightly go over the seams pinching them together.
- Melt the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter and brush it on top of the crescent roll dough. Sprinkle on the remaining ¼ cup of sugar.
- Bake for 30 minutes.
- Refrigerate for at least 2 hours before slicing and serving.
Tips & Notes
- This is a great recipe to make the night before.
- When the bars come out of the oven they will be taller because the cream cheese is still warm and not settled. At this point, the cream cheese will be softer than the finished product. If they were to be cut at this point the cream cheese would squirt out. You can tell the bars are ready to be cut when the bottom of the pan is cold in the middle, and when there is little give when pushing on the top layer of crust.
These are so light, flakey and lemon-yyy that you’ll want to snarf the entire pan, but you won’t because you like to share just like I do. Sharing is caring, and I took these to Christmas dinner as a little snack-a-roo for the extended fam and they were a huge hit! I did have to put up with my weird Uncle Anton telling his tapeworm joke, but it was worth it. The punchline is on the seventh day, when the tapeworm sticks his head out and says “hey, where’s my lemon bar?”, you grab him, and *that’s* how you get rid of a tapeworm! LOL. Love these bars! Make them, eat them, you will, too.
So happy to hear you loved these lemon cream cheese bars as much as we do, Nikki!