Jun. 28, 2021
Cooking In Season
Salad Meals to Beat the Heat
In this recipe round up, I have gathered my best and most delicious summer salad meal recipes in one post, for days when it’s too hot to cook!
May 25, 2011
Rhubarb Custard Bars
Rhubarb custard bars are the all-time most popular recipe on my blog, and for good reason. The tart rhubarb plays perfectly against the sweet buttery crust and smooth vanilla custard. To die for!
Rhubarb season just got even more delicious. All because of this great recipe.
Rhubarb Custard Bars are awesome: such a crisp nutty crust married to a sweet, smooth, sliceable custard, and filled to bursting with tart pieces of rhubarb. Excuse me while I drool.
I’d love to claim this recpe as my own. But, while I have tweaked it a little, original recipe honours must go to Ciara Dooley of Kildara Farms. She gave me this recipe almost 10 years ago and I have been using it ever since, a happy and delicious spring ritual. I love rhubarb crisp, too, but Rhubarb Custard Bars are something different and hand-pie-ish.
My kids call these “Rhubarb Pie Things” (Usage: “Mommy, can I have another Rhubarb Pie Thing? Please? I’ve only had two!”). I just call them extra yummy.
Rhubarb Custard Bars
Rhubarb custard bars are the all-time most popular recipe on my blog, and for good reason. The tart rhubarb plays perfectly against the sweet buttery crust and smooth vanilla custard. To die for!
Ingredients
Crust
1-1/4 cup (175 gm) all purpose flour
1/4 cup (35 gm) whole wheat flour (or use all purpose flour here)
½ cup (114 g) unsalted butter, at cool room temperature
½ cup (100 g) white sugar
¼ tsp (1.5 g) salt
Topping
1½ cups (300 g) sugar
3 eggs
5 Tb (44 g) all purpose flour
2 tsp (10 ml) vanilla extract
¼ tsp (1.5 g) salt
¼ cup (60 ml) whipping cream
4 to 5 cups (approx 1½ lbs / 680 g) rhubarb, chopped small
Instructions
Crust
- Preheat oven to 375 F. Butter the bottom and sides of a 9″ x 13″ (approx) metal or glass pan.
- In a large bowl combine all ingredients. Mix with your fingers until the mixture resembles fine crumbs. Butter should be completely incorporated. You can use a food processor for this step, if you like.
- Press crumbs (not too too firmly, but firm enough) into the bottom of the prepared pan. Press a tiny bit up the sides of the pan as well. Place pan on lower-centre rack of the preheated oven. Bake for about 10 to 15 minutes, until golden. Remove from oven and reduce oven heat to 350 F.
Topping
- While the crust is baking, mix the topping ingredients together.
- In a large bowl, mix the sugar, eggs, flour, vanilla, salt, and whipping cream, whisking well to eliminate lumps. Stir in the diced rhubarb.
- Once the crust comes out of the oven, pour the topping over it (the crust should still be warm). Return to the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes, until custard no longer jiggles and toothpick inserted in the middle comes out mostly clean.
- Let cool. Cut into bars. The first bar is hard to cut, but after that, they should be pretty easy to cut.
- Note: Plan to eat these bars up within two days. If you don’t think you can eat them that quickly, cut the recipe in half and bake it in an 8×8-inch square pan.
“If you don’t think you can eat them that quickly” – hahahaha! I ate 2/3 of the pan by myself in less than 24 hours, and I would have eaten the other 1/3 if I hadn’t given it away so quickly. These are ridiculously more-ish.
“Ridiculously more-ish” – I love that, Laura! Do you mind of I steal that?
So glad you love them. I love them, too!
Even though I click on the ‘printer friendly’ icon, the recipe does not print. Just have to use old fashioned pen and paper.:)
Hi Kate, when you click on ‘printer friendly’ a new page should open up without all the graphics and web buttons, but just the text and recipe. You still have to hit “Print” under the Edit menu in your browser toolbar. I hope this makes sense. 🙂
This is the second year I’ve made this and shared with friends. This year I substituted just whole wheat flour and used only brown sugar…turned out wonderfully 🙂 Yummers! Thank you so much for this recipe!
Thank you for all your great ideas, especially for this recipe. I dd not have whole wheat flour, so I reduced the flour by an 1/8 and replaced it with flax seed. Worked out great! My husband loved it too!!
I just made these and they are absolutely fabulous! I didn’t have any whipping cream but did have some cream cheese. I nuked the cream cheese till it was soft and beat it into the custard prior to adding the rhubarb. Thank you!!
These bars are deadly! I can’t get over the base especially.. Caramelly buttery deliciousness. I made them last night, and between just me and my husband, we ate half the pan in 30 minutes!
And hey, I just realized we’ve likely played ultimate together (on different teams) for years.
I’m glad you liked the bars. Shauna. See you on the field! 🙂