Frosted Sugar Cookie Bars

This is a professional working environment. Some rice. Hello. These are my frosted sugar cookie bars, and today I'm going to show you why this recipe works. Start with our dry ingredients. This is all-purpose flour. I just added some baking powder. I add a little bit of baking soda. I'm going to add a little bit of cornstarch, and that's going to help keep these bars extra soft. I love adding cornstarch to chocolate chip cookies. It just helps guarantee a really soft cookie, especially in the center. And then a little bit of salt. And just mix these together in a medium bowl. Okay, that's done. I'm going to set that aside, and then we'll grab our mixer. You can use a stand mixer or a hand mixer for this. And we're going to start with some unsalted butter. It's softened to room temperature. Make sure that it's not overly soft. You don't want it greasy or melted at all. Still a little cool to the touch, and we're going to cream it with some sugar. That's going to be the base of our sugar cookie bars. Common step in many baking recipes is creaming butter and sugar together. I have this at medium-high speed, and it's going to take about three minutes. It's going to be light, creamy, and fluffy. This step is an important one. It helps build structure and a sturdy, stable base for the rest of our ingredients. This looks good. I'm going to stop it and scrape down the sides. Sometimes it can stick to the bottom, and then some chunks of butter at the bottom. So we want to make sure everything's mixing together properly. Get that going for a few more seconds. This looks great. It's light, it's creamy, it's fluffy. Couple more wet ingredients. We'll add one whole egg, also at room temperature. Then we're going to add just an egg yolk. So I like to add an extra egg yolk, and this is going to help the sugar cookie bars be a little denser and chewier. It just adds like a little bit of richness. These are not cakey sugar cookie bars. They're almost sort of like a sugar cookie brownie, if you will. The texture is phenomenal. Okay, so we've got the egg and egg yolk, a little bit of vanilla for flavor. And then the next ingredient is optional. I like to add this for just an extra little bit of flavor. I add it to my sugar cookies too. So it's almond extract, and it's just going to just complement that vanilla flavor nicely. So those are the wet ingredients. Let's mix those together. It's a very simple recipe, much easier than rolling out sugar cookie dough. Using cookie cutters, just bake it all in one pan. Very simple to decorate with frosting. These just are always a home run. So the dry ingredients that we just mixed together, add those right in, and bring those ingredients together. I am making a mess over here. This is a thick cookie dough, and that's exactly what you're looking for. A mixer just makes really easy work of this process. Okay. Stop and scrape down the sides once again. Pour and mix in. There we go. It's thick and creamy. Then final ingredient are our rainbow sprinkles. Now this is optional. You can make these sugar cookie bars without adding sprinkles to the dough, but I really like adding them. It just makes them so colorful. And these are just rainbow sprinkles. Make sure you're using the Jimmy style sprinkles. Avoid like nonpareils or sanding sugar. Something like Jimmy's or what's called Quinn's, like the little pastel circles. Those are great in this dough because they don't bleed their color. So let's mix these in. Perfect. So colorful already. Then we will put these into our pan and bake them. You don't even need to chill this cookie dough. That's why I love this recipe. If you love sugar cookies, but don't feel like dealing with all of the fuss, definitely make sugar cookie bars. Now we are going to spread this into a nine inch square baking pan. And I've already lined this with parchment paper. Just spoon this thick, thick dough right in. Now I will say this might be like the trickiest step in the recipe is spreading this all around the pan neatly because it's such a thick batter, but that's just going to help bake down into like deliciously soft yet dense sugar cookie bars. Not at all cakey. If I wanted a cakey cookie bar, I would just make cake. I'm actually, I'm going to switch. Let me try switching to this. I was using an offset spatula, but let me try switching it to this. Again, this might be the trickiest part of the recipe because it's so thick, but I'm just gently scraping it over to the sides. And I definitely recommend lining the pan with parchment paper so you can easily lift the bars out of the pan instead of cutting them inside of the pan. So whenever I'm making bars or brownies, I always line the pan. It's a thin layer, but they bake up beautifully. All right, let's bake them. These take about 25 to 26 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. So we'll check them at 25. All right, let's see. Oh, these are done. The edges have lightly browned and the center still looks a little soft and that's exactly what we're looking for. Make sure you let the bars cool completely in the pan before frosting. As the bars finish up cooling, let's make the vanilla buttercream on top. Going to start with room temperature butter again. This is a little soft, but that's gonna be fine for our frosting. And this will make a nice, sturdy, creamy base for our vanilla buttercream. Let's beat this for two minutes until it smooths out. And this will be a thick layer of frosting on the sugar cookie bars. If you don't want frosting in a really thick layer, you can certainly have this recipe, but I've never had any complaints when I serve them. That's a good one. That's good. That has smoothed out. And once again, I'm going to scrape down the sides. I want everything to mix evenly. This is an American style buttercream. It's very simple to make. Just a few ingredients. It's wonderfully sweet. Okay, some confectioner's sugar. It's going to thicken and sweeten the frosting. And I'm going to add some room temperature heavy cream. Make sure it's room temperature. If it was cold, your frosting might look curdled or separated, so room temperature is good. Vanilla extract for flavor. Beat those in and then we'll taste it and add a little bit of salt. I always recommend just at least a pinch of salt in your buttercream, just to help balance out that sweet flavor. I'm using a stand mixer here. You can use a handheld mixer if you have that instead. This looks good. A little bit of salt. Let's beat this for three full minutes. We want this to be a really fluffy buttercream. I'm going to stop and actually scrape down the sides real quick because I notice some powdered sugar here around the sides. I want to make sure everything's all mixed in. That's good. Okay, a couple more minutes. You can keep this buttercream white, of course, but I always like tinting it pink. So I'm just going to add a small drop of red gel food coloring. And I'm going to use a toothpick because this food coloring can come out pretty quickly. One out of here. I'm going to actually open it up like this. Put a little drop on the toothpick. And whenever I want to add just a little bit of color, a toothpick is always handy. And this is like such a very small amount. And the red, we'll tint it pink since it's just a little bit of red gel food coloring. It's a little skimpy. I think I need a little more. And of course you don't have to tint it pink. You can tint it a different color. If you wanted to add a strawberry frosting, you could add freeze-dried strawberry powder to this buttercream, which would make it strawberry flavored and naturally pink colored. So that's a fun option. You could also do the same thing with freeze-dried blueberries for a blueberry frosting. That would make it a light lavender color. Always very pretty. This is great. This is just a nice, pretty pastel pink. All right, this is all done and ready to go. We can frost our bars. These have cooled completely. Super easy to lift right out of the square baking pan from the parchment paper. And let's frost them. And this is going to be a thick layer of frosting. So delicious on top of these bars. I know, I know, it looks like a lot. It looks like a lot, but trust me, it'll spread, it'll spread all around. These are always so much fun to serve at birthday parties or any sort of special gathering. Sprinkles just make everything so happy and exciting. Perfect for any celebration. And I'm just using an offset spatula here to spread the frosting all over the surface. The bars will sink a little bit as they cool. That's completely normal and expected. The center isn't light and fluffy. It's chewier and denser, like a brownie almost. And so there's going to be a little bit of sinking in the center and that's completely normal and expected. No fancy decorating needed. We don't need any piping tips or tools. Here we go. And then I am going to sprinkle some nonpareils on top. Those are fine for decorating. I just always try and avoid them inside dough and batter because they bleed, but they're a beautiful finishing touch. You can skip the sprinkles on top if you'd like. And then just because obviously I'm being a little extra today, I'm going to add even more sprinkles on top. These are the little pastel confetti quins, they're called, like the little circles. Just a little extra color. Okay. All right, let's cut into them. I'm just going to cut a couple because I want to show you what they look like inside. Perfect. It's a beautiful crumb. They're not, again, they're not cakey. They're more like a dense sugar cookie. Very chewy, perfectly sweet, and just so much fun. They're soft and chewy, loaded with sprinkles, piled high with frosting, basically all of the best parts of a sugar cookie with half the work. Mm. Oh, these are good. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you feel inspired to try a new baking recipe today. Head over to my website for the full written recipe and all of my success tips. You can also ask a question right there on the recipe page, and my team and I will be happy to answer.