Banana Pudding Cookie Bar Recipe

Have you ever eaten banana pudding?

It’s one of those desserts that tastes so much better than it sounds. Creamy vanilla pudding with a subtle and natural banana flavour, often served with soft wafer cookies, banana pudding is decadent and delicious.

This month, I wanted to figure out how to make banana pudding a little more portable and a little less messy.

These banana pudding cookie bars definitely fit the bill!

I was a bit stumped at how to convert my healthy banana pudding recipe to cookie form, until I learned that the famous Magnolia bakery uses a boxed banana pudding mix for their own renowned banana pudding.

That made things much easier.

Along with the pudding mix, this recipe also uses vanilla wafer cookies to give a great, chewy, crumbly texture to the banana pudding bars, and I added Ghiradelli white chocolate chips, because I put them in anything I can get away with!

Part of the “trick” to a great cookie bar recipe is to twice bake the “crust” like you would with a pie.

So for this recipe, I mixed melted butter with some of the crushed vanilla wafer cookies and pushed it into a lined 9×13″ baking dish and baked that for 5 minutes while I created the top “layer.” This gives the cookie bars a solid base so they don’t completely fall apart in your hands, without overcooking the rest of the bar which would make it way too hard to eat.

I honestly don’t know who loves these bars more – me or the kids! The awesome thing about making them into bars rather than traditional cookies is that I can control the portion sizes a bit easier — bigger for me, smaller for them!

What do you think? Would you try my banana pudding cookie bar recipe?

PS – I used Jell-O Banana Pudding mix and Nilla wafers, if you’re curious!

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Banana Pudding Bars

Ingredients

• 12 ounces Vanilla Wafers, crushed
• 1 ¾ cup Butter
• 2 ½ cups All Purpose Flour
• 1 teaspoon Baking Soda
• ½ teaspoon Salt
• 1 cup Sugar
• 1-3.4oz package of Banana Cream Pudding Mix
• 2 Eggs
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
• 1 cup White Chocolate Chips

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 400F
2. Crush the wafers and set aside 1 cup for the top layer of the cookie bars.
3. Mix the remaining wafers with 3/4 cups melted butter, and press into the bottom of a 9*13" baking dish. Bake for 5 minutes while preparing the next layer.
4. Stir together the flour, baking soda, salt, sugar, and pudding mix. Mix in the eggs, remaining 1 cup butter, and the vanilla extract until fully incorporated.
5. Stir in the chocolate chips and the reserved vanilla wafers. Spoon the mixture onto the pre-baked crust.
6. Bake the bars at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the bars comes out clean.

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