Cinnamon Bars with Cream Cheese Frosting

My Grandma, Aurelia, is the reason behind my love of cinnamon. When I was growing up, she lived in a “granny cottage” behind our house. While my parents worked, she took care of me. She’d pick me up after school and we always headed straight home for a snack. Typically my snack of choice was a bowl of black olives, a chocolate milkshake with saltine crackers, cold golden corn straight from the can, or some sort of carb with cinnamon and sugar. Ha!

My favorite was her cinnamon sugar toast. She bought these miniature white bread loaves, that were sliced super thinly for English tea sandwiches. And cinnamon sugar toast. 😉 If it wasn’t toast, I’d have cinnamon sugar white rice. I know it sounds weird but it’s absolutely delicious.

We played a spelling game before each snack. She’d typically ask me to spell what I was going to eat. And so, the most popular was always cinnamon. While she dug out the retro cinnamon container from it’s cubby, I’d yell, “C-I-N-N-A-M-O-N!!” at high speed.

Naturally, I still love cinnamon to this day–with anything and everything. *Search cinnamon in the search engine on this homepage and many, many recipes will pop up. These cinnamon bars are basically cinnamon infused Blondies. The recipe calls for an entire tablespoon of cinnamon, which I think is heavenly. If you’re sensitive to cinnamon, reduce it by 1 tsp.

And if that’s not enough, these bars are topped with cream cheese frosting! This recipe was so good that I remade them again the next day. Perhaps in the future, I’ll double the recipe and make it in a 9×13-inch cake pan. I think my Grandma would approve of these bars. I wish she was here to taste them…and to demand that I spell cinnamon.