Perfect Pumpkin Bars
If you’ve ever baked with pumpkin before, then you know it contains a lot of water (pumpkins are 90% water!). Introducing water in baked goods tends tends to make them thicker and cakier, and while this isn’t so much an issue when making something like pumpkin cupcakes, it can become tricky when making pumpkin cookies or these pumpkin bars. Don’t get me wrong, pumpkin bars should be somewhat cakey, but they should really be more dense than a cake, chewy, and handheld…essentially a cookie/cake hybrid! I’m so pleased to share my buttery, pumpkin-y recipe that’s perfectly cakey but that can be enjoyed with or without a fork. This recipe was developed after lots of testing, tweaking, and some help from my Facebook baking club.
What you’ll love about my recipe:
Carefully designed to be chewy and perfectly cakey!Takes less than an hour from start to finish.Feeds a crowd with 24 servings!Can be enjoyed by hand or with a fork.
What You Need
Since we want a less cakey, more dense, cookie-like bar, we’ll be using carefully selected ingredients:
Melted butter. Creaming together butter and sugar creates air bubbles that create a lighter, fluffier (and, I’ve found, sometimes dryer) crumb. For a more moist pumpkin bar, we will instead melt our butter rather than cream it with our sugar.Pumpkin puree. I recommend blotting your pumpkin puree with paper towels to absorb as much of the water as you can (if you’ve made my pumpkin scones, you’ve done this before!). this keeps the bars from being so cakey that they’d fall apart if you tried to eat them by hand.Egg yolks. Even though we are blotting our pumpkin, we’re not going to be able to fully eradicate all of the water in our puree. To avoid adding any additional water, we’ll leave out the egg whites (you can always save them to make meringue cookies!) and just use the yolks for beautifully tender bars.Pumpkin pie spice. If you have a batch of homemade pumpkin spice, now is the time to use it!Cornstarch. Cornstarch is one of my favorite ingredients to add to baked goods, especially my cookies. Not only does it allow us to cut back on the amount of flour (too much flour could cause our pumpkin bars to come out tough or dry!), it also contributes to tenderness. Cream cheese. Nothing pairs with pumpkin quite like classic cream cheese frosting. Use brick-style cream cheese as shown in the photo above, not the spreadable kind often sold in tubs.
SAM’S TIP: Don’t add your sugars while your butter is still hot! Let the melted butter cool until its cool to the touch before proceeding, otherwise you’ll melt your sugars. Remember, this is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!
How to Make Pumpkin Bars
SAM’S TIP: While you can grease and flour your pan, I actually prefer to just line mine with parchment paper. Not only does it make clean-up easier, but it also makes removing the bars from the pan a breeze–simply lift up the paper and slice! If you’re looking for a truly cakey pumpkin bar (one that’s more like a sheet cake!), you can simply bake my pumpkin cake in a jelly roll pan. It will take about 25 minutes this way 😊 Enjoy! Let’s bake together! I’ll be walking you through all the steps in my written recipe and video below! If you try this recipe, be sure to tag me on Instagram, and you can also find me on YouTube and Facebook
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