Oat and Fruit Bars

My little one is obsessed with sticky and chewy sweets. It all started with the Vitamin C supplement that I started to give him. Sometime ago, I handed him a dried apricot and told him it was just like a "sticky sweet". He loved it and asked for more. I then introduced him to raisins, which he enjoyed as well. Then, I got quite excited and bought a whole array of stuff from the dried fruit section. And he soon lost interest.

I wanted to put the stuff to good use. I thought I'd make the jewel blondies again. But since cookies keep better, I decided to look up recipes for dried fruit cookies. I came across this Pillsbury site and decided to try this recipe. I modified the recipe a little and made fruit bars instead of cookies. The next time around I will reduce the sugar in the recipe to maybe 3/4 cup in all.

The end result: bars full of the chewy goodness of oats and dried fruit. This is a keeper recipe and I am sure adding nuts or chocolate/butterscotch chips will work well too.

Ingredients

¾ cup Sugar

¼ cup Brown Sugar

½ cup Butter, softened

½ tsp Vanilla

1 Egg

¾ cup Flour

½ tsp Baking Soda

½ tsp Cinnamon Powder

¼ tsp Salt

1 ½ cups Rolled Oats

1 cup Dried Fruit (I used Apricots, Raisins, Cranberries, Blueberries and Cherries)

Heat the oven to 375 F/190 C. 

Line two cake tins with parchment/baking paper. (I used 9" square tins)

Cream the butter and sugar in a bowl until  fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla beat some more. Add the flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon and mix well.

Add the oats and the dried fruit. Mix together until well blended.

Divide the mixture equally into the two cake tins. Bake for 8-9 minutes.

Remove from the cake tins and allow to cool a little on a rack. Cut into squares while still warm using a sharp knife or a pizza cutter.

Store in an airtight container when completely cool.

These will go into A's snack box next week and maybe I can now safely say goodbye to the store bought cookies/bars.