Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

Feel free to swap walnuts or almonds for the pecans, or use half nuts and half dried cranberries for tart, chewy bars.

Break-and-bake cookies, which come packaged in eight-inch squares, are the secret to these incredible ice cream sandwich bars. Simply roll out all the dough to create one giant cookie, then bake, slice and layer it with store-bought ice cream and hot fudge sauce. The best part: dipping the bars into crushed chocolate toffee candy to form a supercrunchy shell.

For these super-simple, indulgent bars, two layers of chocolate chip cookie dough are sandwiched with a fudgy, three-ingredient filling and baked.

These bars were inspired by the candy and cookies you'd mail to a homesick kid at summer camp.

Almonds and chocolate are a winning combination. For these crisp, chewy bars, Grace Parisi mixes roasted almonds, almond butter and chocolate chips with sugar and egg, then bakes them.

This is Grace Parisi's sophisticated version of magic bars, that chocolate-coconut bake-sale favorite. Browning the butter gives the crust a nutty flavor; cooking it in a metal baking dish makes it extra crisp. In a touch inspired by pastry chefs' favorite new ingredient, Grace adds bacon to the filling.