Friday, November 6, 2009

Quick, Easy & Fantastically Delicious Oatmeal Bars with White Chocolate, Almonds and Cranberries






You're in a rush and you need to come up with something sweet and filling for an afternoon snack as you know your kids are going to roll their eyes at you if you offer what's in your pantry-- rice cakes, pretzels, Goldfish crackers or what's in your fridge -- cheese sticks, yogurt and apples... "So sick of those!"

I keep packaged cookie and cake mixes on hand for various occasions. I am a huge fan of the Betty Crocker cookie mix. You can totally pull these off as homemade (and I think I am going to one day!) especially when you add your own fixins...

To the packaged oatmeal cookie I added butter and egg as the recipe indicated. Instead of water I added a couple of tablespoons of apple cider! Then I tossed in:

1/2 almond meal
1 cup slivered almonds
1 cup of white chocolate chips and
1 cup of dried cranberries

I tossed all ingredients (in no particular order) into the KitchenAid bowl and mixed away until all was well blended.

I took a brownie pan, greased it up really well with non-stick spray and applied the cookie mix to the pan, making sure that it was all evenly spread out.

In my preheated (375 degrees) oven I baked the bars for about 30 minutes.

When they were ready I took them out to cool, and cut them into squares when they were slightly warmer than room temperature.

And then, when you are running late for school and don't have time to make the kids breakfast hand them a cranberry bar and make up some nonsense about them being good for you because they contain oats, nuts and cranberries!

(I have a recipe for an amazing crispy, chewy oatmeal raisin cookie... I thought it was on the blog. But it's not. I'll take care of that over the next couple of days. That recipe can be used for these bars as well.)

1 comment:

Jo said...

Oh yum! I think I may give these a try this afternoon. I'll have to use my own Oatmeal cookie recipe since I don't have a package on hand ~ driving to the store would defeat the purpose, right?! :)

Jo