There’s no question that bar cookies are the quickest and easiest cookies to make. After the batter or dough is mixed it’s baked in one pan and then cut into pieces. You’re done. How many cookies each batch makes depends on how large the pieces are that you cut, and for Christmas when you’re baking any number of different cookies, I suggest making the bars no more than 1¹/₂-inch pieces.

One downside of bar cookies at Christmas, however, is that they usually don’t have the visual appeal of decorated sugar cookies or whimsical gingerbread people. My suggestion is to cut them into very small bites and present them in small paper cups as miniatures. This approach also increases the batch size from twelve or sixteen larger cookies to at least two dozen.

Another way to dress them up is by cutting them into shapes other than squares and rectangles. Diamond-shaped cookies are pretty, and if you cut the bars with a round biscuit cutter you have all the tiny bits between the cookies as a treat for the cook!

A subset of bar cookies is ever-popular brownies and their first cousin, blondies. You’ll find a good range of those recipes in this chapter too.