Eating Well had a section on making fruit bars, and I thought these sounded like they would be a good workday snack. There were three kinds listed (and maybe I’ll make the Dried Fruit Bars and Cranberry Orange Bars sometime) but I decided to make the Apple Cinnamon Fruit Bars since I had some apples I wanted to use up.
I don’t have a food processor, so I used a pastry cutter (affiliate link) to mix together the crust. I used a combination of walnuts and pecans, rather than oats, and I used margarine rather than butter. I started the filling before I started the crust, which means that I neglected stirring it a bit. It started to stick to the bottom of the pan but I don’t think this was a problem overall. I only had about 5 cups of apples when I chopped them up, so I cooked about 3.5 of them and used the other 1.5 cups as the uncooked fruit. I used orange juice rather than cider since that’s what I had in the house.
These baked up pretty well. They looked more or less like what was in the picture. They tasted good, but they also definitely tasted healthy. They were very moist, particularly after being in a container all day. I did individually wrap one, since that’s how the recipe suggested to store them, and that was definitely better in texture than the ones that stayed together in a container. I enjoyed these fine, and I think I’d make them again.
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