Cookies baked on a sheet pan are a miraculous thing; the recipe is simple to follow, and they feed a crowd without the effort of portioning out small spoonfuls of dough. Our childhood lunch lady understood all the strategies of feeding a hungry crowd, so we drew inspiration from her for our Peanut Butter Lunch Lady Cookie Bars. (Though we hope our food tastes a little better than typical lunchroom fare!)

If your normal dessert is something from the grocery store, we recommend that you try making some homemade cookie bars. Of course, store-bought snacks take some of the burden out of entertaining, but once you realize how simple it is, you may never go back. While we normally prefer chocolate, we enjoy a good sheet pan cookie in any flavor. We rarely turn down something sweet! We chose peanut butter for our most recent cookie bars, and it was the ideal selection. Absolutely delicious!

We topped these cookie bars with a peanut butter icing, which is both sweet and the ideal match. You can’t have enough peanut butter. If you want a little more contrast, chocolate icing is a terrific option – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Peanut butter pastries are pretty tasty; of course, we enjoy the sweetness, but the tinge of saltiness adds something unique.

Salty and sweet are truly a marriage made in dessert heaven, and our peanut butter cookie bars combine the best of both worlds on one sheet pan.Sheet pan cookie bars, which are moister than traditional cookies, will become a household staple. The simple icing gives a creamy texture (and more sweetness), and they’re easy to cut into serving sizes. They are rich, salty-sweet, and we can’t get enough of them.