15 Cookie Bar Recipes for Deliciously Easy Holiday Baking
Carefully decorating sugar cookie snowflakes and icing the clothing on gingerbread men and women is good, festive fun, but all of that careful piping can start to feel a bit precious after a while. After all, the whole point of Christmas cookies is to eat the cookies, not sit there and gaze at their intricate beauty. Cookie bars require no fancy decorating, and allow you to focus on what matters most: tastiness. This doesn’t make them ugly, it’s quite the opposite in fact. Cookie bars have a messy, somewhat rustic appeal that beg to be bitten. Their beauty is warm and inviting, unlike the unapproachable pristine prettiness of a perfectly iced Christmas cookie.
In terms of flavor combos, cookie bars have an upper hand. When in bar form, cookies can be layered with oodles of crunchy bits and gooey ripples without having to worry about the structural integrity of an individual cookie. Baking everything in one big slab and slicing it up later frees you not only from scooping out precisely-measured little mounds of dough, but from other tedious cookie concerns such as spacing and spreading.
In short: I am a fan of the cookie bar, and think it a better holiday confection than the classic sugar cookie. I’m all for baking and decorating a batch or two of snowmen or whatever, but if I need to make a big batch of crowd-pleasing cookies for a holiday shindig, I’m going to turn to bars, most likely one of the recipes below. They’re easy. They’re delicious. They’re pretty much unbeatable.
Want even more sweet holiday inspiration? Check out the links below:
The Perfect Gingerbread Cookie Recipe, from Bouchon Bakery
Homemade Espresso Caramel Turtles Are the Best Last-Minute Gift
