Oatmeal M&M cookie bars: insanely easy potluck dessert
Decidedly unfussy and ready in about 30 minutes to feed a crowd, these oatmeal M&M cookie bars are the recipe you need when you’re short on time and need to feed a crew.
Show up to a potluck with a sheet pan full of these easy bars, and they’ll easily outshine any pre-packaged stale cookie any day.
| Taste | Texture |
| Brown sugar oatmeal with chocolatey M&Ms | chewy, soft |
| Active time | Total time | Yield | Difficulty |
| 10 min | 30 minutes | 32 cookies or more | Easy |
If you’re anything like me, I love taking big containers of cookies with me to places to share with people. Most of the time, I pack things up in my favorite Rubbermaid 1 gallon TakeAlong containers, but sometimes you want something both sturdier and easier. Hence the beauty of the sheet pan cookie bars. This is a life hack you need!
Why you’ll want to file away this Oatmeal M&M cookie bars recipe
- Ultra portable: You don’t even need to pack up these bars. Simply cover the top with foil, and you can take them camping, to church potlucks, to kids’ sports games, picnics, and so many more places. It’s hard to think of a better transport device than a sheet pan. It will protect the cookies from getting broken and it’s a serving dish all in one.
- You can feed SO many people: It takes time to shape and bake a batch of cookies. Here you just pat it into a pan and can get more servings from just one round in the oven. I cut my bars into 32, but really, you could cut them smaller or bigger as you’d like. There is an inherent friendliness about these cookies that invites people in and asks them to hang out a little while. That’s my kind of dessert.
- Great oatmeal cookie taste, just different format: The dough for these oatmeal bars is the same as for my loaded oatmeal cookies, but they’re baked all at one time in a sheet pan. While they don’t have exactly the same texture as those cookies, you still get that great classic oatmeal cookie flavor in a homier cookie bar.
- Change up your M&Ms for the season: You can change up the colors on your M&Ms for different seasons of the year. Here I’m using 4th of July colors, but feel free to use classic M&Ms anytime or Spring colors as in my Easter blondies or Fall colors around Halloween and Thanksgiving or red and green for Christmas. You get the idea.
Fun things to do with these bars you probably wouldn’t do with regular cookies
- Oatmeal ice cream sandwiches: Soften some ice cream and spread it in a sheet pan. Better yet, make one of my ice cream recipes and freeze it in the sheet pan. Cut the ice cream after you freeze it solid into pieces to fit your sheet pan cookies for easy easy ice cream sandwiches.
- Use the dough as a base for pie: Divide the dough between 2 pie pans. Bake and fill with your favorite filling. I’ll suggest vanilla pastry cream, chocolate pastry cream, or turn it into peanut butter pie.
- Use it as the base for an ice cream sundae: Move over brownie sundae, these cookies would be great on the bottom of a sundae.
- Milkshake mix-ins: Cut up the bars into small squares and mix them into a milkshake or a Frosty.
Ingredients for Oatmeal M&M bars
- Cooking spray, for the pan
- Butter, at room temperature
- Granulated sugar
- Light or dark brown sugar
- Eggs
- Vanilla extract or vanilla paste
- Old fashioned rolled oats
- All-purpose flour
- Baking powder
- M&Ms candy, any mix of colors
Equipment needed
- 1/2 sheet pan
- parchment
- double rolling pin : helpful but not necessary
- Pizza wheel
How to make M&M cookie bars
- Make the cookie bar dough: Mix the butter and sugars until it’s a smooth paste. You don’t need to beat this as much as for the loaded oatmeal cookies since these are a flatter cookie. Give it a minute, and you’re good to go. Add in the eggs and vanilla, then the oats, flour, baking powder, salt, and about half the M&Ms. Mix until the flour just disappears.
- Pat the dough into the pan: Spray a sheet pan with just enough cooking spray to make a piece of parchment stick to it. Press the parchment in place and spritz the short sides of the pan with a little more cooking spray. Press the dough into the pan. The easiest way to do this is to cover the dough with plastic and smooth it out with a rolling pin , preferably a double sided rolling pin . This little gadget is great for getting into the corners of pans!
- Bake: Top the bars with the rest of the M&Ms, and then bake in a 350 F (180 C) oven for about 20 minutes. The edges will be just browning at this point, and the cookie should feel set.
- Cut: Let the cookies cool for about 5 minutes and then cut the cookie sheet into 32 pieces (or more or less). A pizza wheel is handy for this job.
More bar cookies to bake
Oatmeal M&M cookie bars
- Total Time: 30 minutes
- Yield: 32 cookie bars 1x
Description
One of the fastest, easiest bar cookies you can make also serves the most people. Bring a pan of these easy sheet pan Oatmeal M&M bars to a potluck, and there won’t be a single crumb leftover for the mice.
Ingredients
Scale
- Cooking spray, for the pan
- 2 sticks butter (227 grams), at room temperature
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar (150 grams)
- 3/4 cup packed brown sugar (160 grams)
- 2 large eggs, at room temperature
- 1 tsp vanilla extract or vanilla paste
- 2 cups old fashioned rolled oats (190 grams)
- 2 cups all-purpose flour (260 grams)
- 3/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 12 oz bag of M&Ms, any color
Instructions
Make the cookie dough
- Spritz a baking sheet with enough cooking spray to make a piece of parchment stick to the pan. Press the parchment into the pan. Preheat the oven to 350 F (180C).
- Cream the butter with the sugars on low speed (Kitchen Aid 1 or with a hand mixer) for about 1 minute, just enough to make the sugars and butter into a smooth paste. It’s not necessary to beat more air into this mixture.
- Add in the eggs, one at a time. Add in the vanilla and beat for a few more seconds.
- Mix the flour, baking powder, salt, and about half the M&Ms in a bowl.
- Scrape the bowl and beater well, paying attention to the bottom of the bowl which always likes to hide a little pocket of unmixed butter.
- After you’ve finished scraping, pour in the dry ingredients (the mixer should be off!). Lower the mixer paddle into the whole mix, then carefully turn the mixer on then off rapidly. If you make this on/off motion in one little microsecond burst at a time, the flour won’t go everywhere. After a few power pulses, the mixer should be able to mix everything without flinging flour. Mix just until you see no flour–about 10 seconds.
Bake the sheet pan cookies
- Scoop the dough into the middle of the cookie sheet.
- Cover the dough with a piece of plastic wrap and press the dough into the corners of the pan. Start out doing this with your hands, and then if you have a small rolling pin , you can further press the dough into the corners.
- Top the sheet of dough with the rest of the M&Ms. Lightly press the candy into the top of the dough.
- Bake two prepared sheet pans of cookies for 18-20 minutes, just until the edges start to brown and the middle of the cookie feels set.
- Allow the cookie sheet to cool about 5 minutes. Cut the cookie sheet into 32 bars (or more or less depending on how many people you want to serve. Serve the cookies straight from the pan.
Storing the cookies
- You can store the cookies at room temperature for up to 2 days.
- Freezing: freeze the whole sheet tray, covered with foil and plastic wrap or a sheet pan lid for up to 3 months.
Notes
- Prep Time: 10 minutes
- Cook Time: 20 minutes
- Category: Bar cookies
- Method: Oven
- Cuisine: American
