Have you ever set out to make something and you expect it to be pretty good, a perfectly respectable recipe, and instead it knocks your socks off? That’s what happened to me with these Orange Cream Cheese Bars. I thought they’d be good enough but I couldn’t have predicted quite how much I’d love the combination of a creamy cheesecake layer and the brightness of fresh orange zest. It’s delightful. So just trust me — these are comforting, these are creamy and bright, these are good.

These are a two-layer situation, but it’s a combination of pantry and shortcut ingredients so that doesn’t mean they’re in any way difficult.

The first layer — the crust — is just a combination of vanilla cake mix, butter, an egg, and some salt that’s been mixed together and then pressed into your baking dish. Easy peasy.

You don’t have to bake the crust layer first; you just pour the cheesecake layer over the top, and that layer is simply a mixture of cream cheese, powdered sugar, orange zest and orange extract, and a couple of eggs.

And then you bake.

It seems so simple (and it is!) but it’s a situation where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. See, there’s the denser layer of cake-crust and the creamy, almost gooey top layer of cheesecake above it but there’s something to the addition of orange here.

You ever had a Creamsicle? Those orange popsicles with the creamy center? Well, I think these have that same kind of citrus and cream magic.