13 Delicious Bar Cookie Recipes that Can Serve a Crowd (2024)

FAQs

What pan is best for bar cookies? ›

9-by-13-inch baking pans: To make bar cookies, you obviously need a pan to bake them in. I prefer metal, straight-sided pans that truly measure 9 by 13.

For cake-like bars, test with a wooden pick inserted at the center of the pan. If it comes out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it, the cookies are done. Chewy (moister) bars will have a dull, rather than shiny, surface; a slight imprint will remain after touching the surface lightly with your fingertip.

For a 13×9 Pan:

On the long side of the pan, make a mark and cut down every 2 1/10-inches, so you have 6 columns. Turn the pan to its shorter side and make one cut down the middle, 4 ½-inches from the edge. You'll end up with 12 2 1/10×4 ½-inch rectangles.

Bar cookies baked in insulated baking pans often don't brown well. Try baking bars longer than called for in your recipe. Realize that most published recipes are not developed using insulated pans. Ideally, only bake one baking pan of bar cookies at a time, placing it on a rack in the middle of the oven.

A chef's knife is a great tool for slicing bar cookies, but before you cut, coat the blade with cooking spray and wipe it clean with a paper towel.

For a 9 x 13-inch pan, first cut the bars lengthwise into 4 equal-sized strips. Start with one cut down the middle from one short side to the other. Then cut a slice halfway between the edge of the pan and the center cut on both sides to make 4 long strips.

Bakery or homemade cookies can be stored at room temperature two to three weeks or two months in the refrigerator. Cookies retain their quality when stored in the freezer for eight to 12 months. Moist bars, such as cheesecake and lemon bars, can be refrigerated for seven days.

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

Starchy side dishes and casseroles: a 9 X 13 pan makes about 12 one cup servings.

From this you can see that you can substitute two 8” pans for the 9”x13” one as 2x64 = 128 square inches which is close enough. CALCULATING SQUARE INCHES FOR ROUND PANS is a little more complicated.

How much bigger is a 9x13 than an 8x8? ›

The area of a 9x13 pan is 117 square inches. The area of a 8x8 pan on the other hand, is 64 square inches, or close to half that of a 9x13 pan. This means you can scale a recipe down from a 9x13 pan to an 8x8 pan by simply halving the recipe.

Re-baking will give us hard, brick-like cookies and bars. The other concern is the eggs. If the bars are so underbaked that the eggs are still raw, it's probably not a good idea to eat or even try to re-bake them if the bars have been sitting out for very long.

Cookies become hard when the moisture in them evaporates. This can be caused by leaving them out in the air for too long, baking them for too long, or storing them improperly.

The bottom of your cookies can burn for a variety of reasons. Your oven is too hot. The cookies baked for too long. Even the color of your baking sheet affects the bottoms of your cookies.

Baking Pans for Bars

Those include an 8" x 8" x 2" baking pan, a 13" x 9" baking pan, or a 14" x 10" jellyroll pan, depending on what the recipe specifies. (Learn more about baking pans and how to choose one.)

While stainless steel is a preferred material for many cookware pieces, it's widely known to be a poor performer in the baking sheet category because it's not as good at conducting heat as aluminum.

– but metal does an overall better job than glass of baking almost everything except for acidic desserts. It bakes evenly because it heats up so quickly. It also browns beautifully and crisps to perfection.

That is actually my first tip. I use a glass pan (like this Pyrex Baking Dish ) instead of a metal one, because I always found the edges would get to brown in the metal pan. That would also cause all the bars along the edge to stick. The glass pan doesn't over do the edges and they don't stick nearly as much.