Chocolate Oat Bars

Sarah Kieffer has four baking cookbooks now, and I’ve always found her recipes to be easy to follow and delicious. I paged through her new 100 Afternoon Sweets and the headnote for this recipe made me laugh, remarking on her experience working at a coffee shop, and that patrons felt good about eating these bars as a breakfast treat because of the oats ;) I figured they were a good afterschool snack because of that, so here we are. You basically make an oat crust, a brownie center, then crumble some crust over the top for looks.

I have tested these with Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free 1 to 1 Baking Flour and while they were pretty crumbly, they held their shape! Her original recipe is made in a 9x13 pan but we didn’t need that many bars, so I halved it as best I could and baked it in an 8” square pan. They turned out great and I still had 16 small squares to share. Recipe below reflects this change, and when I use the word “scant”, I mean a little less than the measurement since it didn’t halve easily :)

Recipe from 100 Afternoon Sweets by Sarah Kieffer.