Quick Oatmeal Bar Recipe

 

 

 

I have a yummy treat for you all!!!! My dear husband likes to have snack bars for his lunch at work. Well If you look at the ingredients, and the price of buying the pre made pre packaged snack bars in the store, its almost like...whoa...wait a min, I can make a healthier version of that at home for half the price...so I put my mind to it, and came up with these yummy yummy bars for you guys to enjoy...oh and the best part is, they don't really take that long to make!!!

 

Now, I made 3 different versions of the same bar, using some dehydrated fruit that my darling husband made, and filled many, many bags full of and stuffed in the freezer.  So with just a basic recipe, and some freeze dried fruit, you can make any flavor you like.

Basic recipe

 

1 stick unsalted butter

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup quick cooking oats

 

First cream together the butter and sugars, then mix in eggs and vanilla. After that stir in the remaining ingredients. 

 

Once you get everything mixed together take your favorite dehydrated fruit (You probably could use fresh, and it will be good, but it wont keep as long)  tear the fruit up into small pieces and mix in.

 

Then spread the batter in the bottom of a greased and floured 8 inch square pan. Bake at 350 for 20-25 min. I did the full 25 min for mine.

 

Once its cooled, take a butter knife and run it along the edges of the pan, and turn over onto a cooling rack. Once its cool to the touch, cut it in half long ways, and then cut each half into 5 bars.

 

For the 3 different flavors I used strawberries, apples and cinnamon, and peaches. Even though I used the same recipe for each one minus the difference in the fruit, the fruit gave each one its own flavor, and gave it that good chewy texture that you would expect from a snack bar.

 

As you can see from the bottom picture, Sam thought they smelled so good, he decided to hang out and hope for dropsies...and no the poor little guy didn't get a single crumb.