Delicious, “Crumbly Blueberry Bars”

Here’s a delicious dessert, “Crumbly Blueberry Bars,” which combines two of my favorite ingredients and flavors — blueberries and oatmeal. Both these ingredients have many nutritional benefits which adds to the appeal of this dessert bar. I still have blueberries in my freezer to use from my last summer’s backyard blueberry crop. So, I’m making this very simple recipe for “Crumbly Blueberry Bars” with some of these frozen berries. These bars are very soft and crumbly — they are best eaten when served as a dessert bar with a fork. They make a great breakfast bar when served with yogurt as well as a snack or dessert.

Nutritional Value of Blueberries and Oatmeal

As far as nutritional value goes, blueberries and oatmeal must close to the top of everyone’s lists of “power-house” foods. Blueberries are rich in anti-oxidants and other vitamins. Oatmeal contains heart-healthy cholesterol-lowering fiber.

Ingredients:

Here are the ingredients. For the oatmeal, I used Steel cut oats. This type of oats has a finder grind that old-fashioned oatmeal but it still retains lots of flavor and texture when baked. Steel cut oats is quickly becoming one of my favorite ingredients for use in recipes. And I used self-rising flour — another re-discovered ingredient. This flour eliminates the need to measure out and combine baking powder, soda and salt — these ingredients are all included in the flour. Self-rising flour works well in this type of pastry. I added a little cinnamon which gives a spicy “pop” to these bars.

Frozen blueberries work great in this recipe. Frozen blueberries are slightly chewy. They seem to fit in with the other ingredients of this pastry dessert. However, you can substitute in fresh blueberries.

Making the Recipe

This is another simple “almost” one-bowl dessert recipe. No need to get stressed out about a major baking project. The recipe does not involved any cooking on the stove and an electric mixer is not needed — although a food processor is handy for blending the crust ingredients. To make this dessert, just process the butter into the dry ingredients (self-rising flour, sugars and cinnamon) until the mixture is crumbly. Use a food processor or two forks or a pastry blender for this step. Then stir in an egg and vanilla extract. The mixture is crumbly.

Pat half of the crumbs into the bottom of an oiled baking pan which is lined with aluminum foil. Pour in the blueberries (mixed with sugar and cornstarch).

Add the Steel cut oats to the remaining half of crumbs and sprinkle on top of the blueberries and bake. Cool to room temperature, cut and serve.

This dessert is very crumbly. Fortunately, I lined the baking pan with aluminum foil and overlapped the edges of the pan. Then I was able to grab the aluminum foil “handles” and remove the pastry from the pan for cutting into bars.

I love these easy-to-prepare bars. They are full of flavor and also nutritional value.

This recipe made a large amount. Plenty to freeze. It is so easy — and tasty — to take out a bar one at a time from the freezer for an breakfast or afternoon snack break.

Here are blossoms from one of my blueberry bushes this spring. My four blueberry bushes are just loaded with these blossoms which, hopefully, means another great crop of blueberries. Time to get these frozen blueberries from last summer used.