These Gooey Pecan Pie Bars Are So Easy to Make!

Craving pecan pie without the fuss? In this replay of my LIVE bake-along, I show you how to make **gooey, buttery pecan pie bars** that are 100% vegan, ready in under an hour, and secretly packed with protein from silken tofu! No one will guess…they’re just as indulgent as the classic. 😍

**Why You’ll Love These:**
– **Press-in crust**: No rolling, just mix & dump into a parchment-lined 9×9 pan
– **Custom gooeyness**: Control the texture with cornstarch (firm or extra fudgy!)
– **Rustic crunch**: Scatter pecans on top for that bakery-style vibe
– **Chocolate upgrade**: Stir in chips for chocolate pecan pie bars heaven

Perfect for fall parties, Thanksgiving, or holiday cookie swaps!

**⏰ Timestamps:**
0:00 Intro & Why Vegan Pecan Pie Bars Rock
0:55 Quick Press-In Crust (5 Ingredients!)
4:28 Silky Gooey Filling Sauce
5:18 Cornstarch Hack: Gooey vs. Firm
6:54 Stress-Free Baking Tip
7:24 Secret Filling Ingredient (adds protein!)
14:19 Adding Pecans for Crunch + Chocolate Chips Option
18:25 Taste Test & Dessert Perfection

**Full Recipe + Printable:** https://namelymarly.com/pecan-pie-bars-vegan/

**👉 Try it & tag me @Namelymarly on IG/TikTok!**
Which version are you making—classic gooey, firm, or chocolate? Drop a 🍫 or 🌰 below!

**More Recipes You’ll Love:**
• Dark Chocolate Magic Bars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_wAZpTN6gM&t=9s
• Vegan Scotcheroos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHhc8j-h6HM&t=2s
• Vegan Desserts Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blDvs-rwJgM&list=PLdKKGs33CnSl5ROLwYYwNRmN7WIdO7I7y

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About Namely Marly:
Hi, I’m Marly McMillen, and it’s my honor to show you my favorite vegan recipes that I’ve created just for you. After years of struggling with issues like IBS and disordered eating, transitioning to a vegan diet made ALL THE DIFFERENCE for me. I love the way I feel and eat these days! I focus on a varied diet combining delicious healthy foods + indulgences. It keeps my day-to-day eating fun, interesting, and wholesome. I want you to share in the food and life journey with me! CLICK SUBSCRIBE so you never miss my videos!

Welcome back to my kitchen. Today we’re going to make one of my very favorite fall treats, which is vegan pecan pie bars. Just imagine everything you love about a pecan pie that’s gooey and buttery and full of all that sweet pecan flavor and it’s made in a bar form, so that makes it so much easier. I love, you know, actually my pecan pie recipe is one of the most most popular on my site and so I’ve tested it so many times and this is just basically a bar version of that recipe and I’m so excited to share it with you. I’ve really love pecan pie bars and so this makes it just such a fun treat to share during the holidays and also just if you’re going to a party, this is the treat that everybody’s going to go nuts over. Pardon the pun. Okay, so let’s get started. Let’s get started. Did I just dropped some here? Okay. So, we’re going to start with 1 and 1/4 cups of allpurpose flour. And and to that I’m going to add a/ teaspoon of salt. And we’re going to add a/4 cup of brown sugar. And I’m just going to stir that all together. I like to stir the dry ingredients first because it definitely u helps distribute them throughout the ingredients better. So that works. And um and then we’re going to add here we’re going to add a/2 cup of melted vegan butter. So we’re going to give that a stir. This creates a nice buttery crust that’s so much easier than rolling out a pie. I don’t know about you, I I don’t trust me, I love baking and I love making pies during the holidays, but it’s nice to um also have some vast options. You know what? If you’ve got like friends coming over impromptu and you want to make throw something together, this would be a great dessert to share. So, let me just um get the pan out here. What I have is a 9 in square baking pan. I’ve lined it with parchment paper. And I like to have the parchment paper overhang this a little bit. That way you have the option of um you can easily um put the the dough in or the crust in and it’s no big deal. So it just stays it keeps the stain out of the way. Um and also what I meant about the overhang. Sorry, I need to do this right. When these are done, it makes it so much easier to pull them out of the pan. That’s why I like having an overhang. Okay. So, honestly, I think it’s easier just to get your hands in here. We want to just press this around the pan. And sometimes it’s just easier to get your fingers involved. That’s the way I look at it. What I like to do is just kind of get it distributed around the pan. I know you see all these fingerprints and you know it looks uneven, but we’re going to fix that in just one second. Okay. Then what I like to do is get the bottom of um a measuring cup and just that we can just use that to kind of flatten things out a little bit. And it doesn’t have to be perfect. I just want it to be relatively even cuz everybody likes the crust. They don’t want to have one section that doesn’t have any crust to it. As long as you’ve got that covered, you’re good. This is going to go in the oven. I’ve got it preheated to 350° F. Normally, I like to bake it to around 15 minutes. Today, I think we’re going to be getting closer to 10, and that’s going to be fine. We just want to give it a nice little bake while we’re making the other ingredients. So, that’s going to go in the oven. I’m going to take the clip off. I always forget that part. That’s just going to bake as we’re making the filling. Now, let’s move on. Speaking of the filling, let’s move on to the filling. So, I have um a saucepan here. In it, I have five tablespoons of vegan butter that you can hear is sizzling nicely. Um, normally I have all these ingredients together, but this thing takes a while to heat up, so I just decided to go ahead and get it going. So, this is a cup of brown sugar and a half cup of maple syrup. And I’m using a combination to be completely honest. This is a combination of brown sugar and I mean sorry maple syrup and corn syrup because I happen to like the gooness of corn syrup and I love the flavor of maple syrup. So I find the combination of the two is nice. You can use just all maple syrup and that’s fine. Oh, I better get this. I have three tablespoons of cornstarch that we’re going to add into this. Let me get that in there quickly. And just give it a good stir. It’s really important that you get that all stirred up. Um so that the cornstarch doesn’t get any lumps in it. There we go. Got a little bit more butter in this. So we’ll put that in there. There we go. Okay. So then the goal is just going to be to bring that up to a simmer. Um like I say, um as I was saying before, you can use all maple syrup and that’s fine. You can use all corn syrup. I have definitely done both and it works just fine. Um I actually love using the dark corn syrup because I think it gives it a nice color. And um any any syrup that you like is going to work just fine in this recipe. It just helps it create that gooey texture that we’re looking for. And by bringing it what we’re doing is bringing this to a simmer. And the reason that we’re doing that is because we want to activate the corn starch. Um, and also we want to caramelize start the brown sugar in that caramelization process. It makes these bars so gooey. Um, you can use light or dark brown sugar. Either works just fine. I like using the light, but I think the dark brown sugar actually does create a a filling that’s a little bit darker and makes has a little bit more of a caramel look to it. that works just really nicely. So, what I like to do is stir it every now and then. And I wanted to let you know, never freak out about your recipe if you end up with lumps in your because the cornstarch maybe didn’t uh get stirred all the way or you didn’t, you know, some for some reason you ended up with lumps in your sauce. No worries. You can just simply put it in a food processor or if you’ve got an immersion blender, that works well, too. You know, I love to just like have stress-free baking. Stress free is is the way to go. And um so don’t stress out if if it ends up getting lumps in it. You can just put it in the food processor and that’s fine. While this is u coming to a simmer, I want to talk to you a little bit about um tofu because we’re going to be using silken tofu as the egg replacer. I know it sounds crazy. It works great. In fact, that’s what these bars are made of. Um yeah, I don’t think you can tell that there there’s tofu in this at all. So, trust me, this is going to work. I used basically this um this is silk and tofu. And I love that it’s shelf stable cuz I can buy a whole bunch of them and they just sit like I I love keeping these around. And the other thing that’s really nice about it is tofu has protein in it. So, that gives these protein it gives these bars a little bit of protein whereas, you know, they wouldn’t have otherwise. So, I just get silk and tofu and this is um you know, I think this says it’s around 11 oz. I in my recipe I say a cup. Um that is just fine. And what I like to do is I you know I just use the whole container, put it in the food processor or today I used an immersion blender because I actually was hoping I could just smash it with a fork. But you can see it has a tendency to get um it still has some texture in it. I really like it when I use the food processor the best because that gets it really smooth. But you can still see some lumps in here. But it’s going to be fine. I’m just saying um if if you can use a food processor or a blender, you’re going to get a much better consistency and texture with that. So, but I think once it gets heated up, I think that’ll it’ll all get worked out. So, it’s going to be fine. Anyway, let’s just take a look at where we’re at with our sauce. It’s coming. It’s starting to come to a simmer. It’s pretty important that you let that simmer happen. If you’re like me, I’m always looking for steps that I can skip because I’m uh I guess I would say I’m pretty impatient when it comes to being, you know, well, maybe just about everything. Would you agree, honey? Yeah. Sean rolls his eyes with great agreement. Yes, I’m pretty impatient and especially when it comes to cooking. So, if there was a step I could skip, let me tell you, I’d be skipping it. But this, I find you have to let this come to a simmer. So, go ahead and just like stand over it if you have to. and it’s going to be fine. I was going to talk to you a little bit about um the crust option because I realize some people may be wondering if they can make it with um a gluten-free class crust. And I think that is a perfect opportunity if you’ve got gluten-free people coming to your party. Definitely just use a gluten-free one on, you know, one to one baking powder or flour. You can find that at most grocery stores, so that works just fine. Um, another thing that you probably could get by with would be, you know, doing like a cookie crumb crust. So, you could do a gluten-free cookies that are mashed up and, you know, like last week we did the recipe or a couple weeks ago we did a recipe that had um the magic bars and they had that graham cracker crust. So, you could totally do a gluten-free graham cracker crust on on the base of this. That would be so good. I can imagine, you know, pecan pie bars with a, you know, graham cracker crust. Wow, that would be pretty amazing. And I also want to talk with you a little bit about um some fillins that you could add, particularly chocolate, because if you’re ever seen them and if you’re curious about chocolate pecan pie bars, they are stunning to look at because the chocolate gets very shiny. So you could add around a half cup of chocolate chips to um this mixture and it works so nicely and and then you’ve got chocolate pecan pie bars. Trust me, I don’t think you would regret it. Yes, please. Yeah, Sean says, “Yes, please.” We’ll be doing it today, honey. So, that’s good. And then let’s talk about the pecans because you absolutely can toast these. I in fact, I almost always toast them. Today, I did not. Um I’m just going to show you really quickly. We’re going to come back to the pecans in just a second because we have action going on in the saucepan. So, the this is boil this is, you know, simmering nicely. And what I like to do is um set the timer for a minute. And we’re just going to let this simmer for a minute. Sometimes, you know, if it once you get it boiling, it’ll go too rapid and you want to slow down, you know, low down lower the heat a little bit to maybe medium. I had it up to high cuz you don’t what you don’t want is that brown sugar to cook too much and then as a result um it the it’ll caramelize very firmly. We want a soft, gooey caramel layer. So, there we go. I’m I’m going to just lower that up a little bit because it’s really coming to a boil. Can you see that? That’s really nice. That’ll add some color to this recipe, too. Okay, I’m going to take that off. Perfect. Let me get this out of the way. It’s still hot. So So what I’m going to do is add um oh well to this actually what we’re going to do is add a/ teaspoon of salt. And while it’s still there, I’m also going to add a tablespoon of vanilla. So in my pecan pie recipe, I actually include bourbon. And you can do that because it adds a nice little flavor to it. I love that chemical reactions in the kitchen. Um, but I just thought for this one, we’re just going to do just um just the vanilla. But if you wanted to add that kind of, you know, smoky bourbon flavor, you can totally add um a tablespoon of bourbon to this as well. Let’s do this. We’re going to pour this in here. And we’re going to give this a stir. Now, I typically do this in the food processor, this part. This is my first time doing it this way, so I sure hope this works. But I did want to show you how easy it could be and that you didn’t have to use a food processor. That said, you know, you’re going to see a lot a little bit more texture from the tofu as a result. Let me just get the rest of this tofu in here. And I think what I’m going to do is get my whisk. I think the whisk is going to make this There we go. Because, you know, with the heat of that mixture um of the maple syrup mixture. It softens up that tofu. So, that worked out just fine. Perfect. [Music] Now, to this, we’re going to add pecans. Let’s get back to the pecans. I started to talk with you about that. Normally, what I like to do is lay the pecans out on a sheet, and as the oven is preheating, I’ll let them um I just, you know, I have a sheet lined with parchment paper, baking sheet, and just lay them out on a single layer. Let them cook for like five minutes. And that way u they get a nice toasty flavor. That said, you don’t have to do that in today’s proof cuz I’m I did not toast these and I think this is going to be just fine. What I like to do is reserve I measure out two cups into into a pan, you know, into a measuring cup. And then I I I take about 40 to 50 of them out. These are the what are what’s going to go in the top. Then the rest of them get a nice little chop. I like to leave a lot of texture with these pecan pie bars because I want I want every bite to have crunchy pecans in it. So, that’s going to go in here. And I’m going to give that a stir. That looks amazing. See how you got lots of nice texture in here from the pecans? It’s perfect. Okay. And then here is where if you’d wanted to add some chocolate chips, you can do that. I like to do that actually in the crust. So, let me get the crust out of the oven. Like I say, it normally I would bake this crust just a little bit longer, but I think it’s going to be fine. So, that crust smells so good. Smells buttery. Delicious. So, um let’s see. We’re going to add, let’s just add a little bit of chocolate chips on the bottom. I have, like I said, around a half a cup here. I just kind of like to make sure they’re spread around equally. Okay. And then we’re going to pour this over the top. I like to get it all. Okay. Look how amazing that looks. Okay. And then what I like to do is, you know, when I do the pecan pie, I think you can see the video that I did on this. I try to I love to arrange them so that you know and they’re in these nice little circles all around the pie. But when I do the bars, I like them to have a little bit more rustic look to them. So, I just kind of throw them on top like this. Try to make sure you get them in the corners. I just think it looks I don’t know for bars. I just think it looks nice to have them just scattered throughout. That’s it. That’s it for these bars. This is going to go into the oven and this is going to bake for around 40 minutes. I want you to see this. You look down in here, Sean. When they bake for like 40 45 minutes or I think 40 45 minutes is perfect. You’re still going to have a little jiggle in the center like that. It won’t be that jiggly, but a little bit. And that’s okay because as they sit in the pan once you remove them, they’re going to they’re going to firm up and that is going to be that is going to give you that gooey texture that at the same time, you know, is is firm enough that you can grab it with your hand, you know, um, and and pick it up like that, but at the same time, it’s got a nice gooey center that everybody is craving, I’m telling you. So, yeah. I think we talked about chocolate. Another thing that you could add on top, these are so sweet that I think sprinkling a little bit of that coarse sea salt is a very nice touch and I highly recommend it. So, I I don’t know about you, but I feel like I have to do the taste test because um I’ve I’ve had to be, you know, endure these bars being in my kitchen for so long and now I need to have them. I need to taste it. So, let’s go for this. That is so good. I love that gooey. [Music] That’s got the perfect like pecan pie flavor in a bar form with that nice buttery crust. I’m sure you can see that in there. That crust has a little bit of a bite to it. That is delicious. It’s just so good. And you’ve got a little bit of flavor of maple. The vanilla, the the gooness of the, you know, brown sugar comes through. And I love it’s just the right amount of cornstarch to add the thickening. Oh, that’s just perfect. I’m sorry, but I feel like this is dessert perfection. And it’s something that you’d be proud to share at your next party. So, I highly recommend that you make these bars and and if you do, I would love to hear from you. And I just want to know, are you going to be adding chocolate chips to yours? So, leave a comment and let me know if chocolate chips are going to be in your pecan pie bars. So, that’s it for today’s recipe and I’m so excited that you joined me in my kitchen because I don’t know, I feel like when you’re here, it’s always so much fun and I enjoy, you know, just talking with you and being in the kitchen. So, if you like today’s video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more recipes coming your way every week.