In my pantry there is a large bag of Bob's Red Mill rolled oats. Well, it's part of a bag because my perpetually busy form hasn't put the rest of it in a bucket. I have lots of buckets of commodities laying about, but that's a different post all together.
Anyway, after my great success with soaking some dried cranberries in fresh squeezed orange juice and adding them to a cookie recipe, I felt a hankering to do something like that with raisins. Also, I really wanted to make the hubs an oatmeal cookie treat of some sort as he has been hard at work on hand carving a massive wood sign.
Sitting in my medieval spice cupboard is a small glass jar of maple syrup from Canada. I love maple everything and wanted to do something cool with that syrup. In another cupboard was a carton of raisins left over from the holiday baking bonanza, about a cup of the things, so in a moment of need to infuse things excitement, I decided to soak the raisins in maple syrup before incorporating them into my oatmeal cookie bars.
And you know what? I did just that. I broke down the sugar ratio in my standard cookie bar recipe and substituted the soaking maple syrup for that part of the sweetener.
Now, for the next 30 days I am not ingesting any refined sugar, so I didn't get to eat these luscious smelling cookie bars, and honestly, now that I am ten days into no sugar consumption, I wasn't even tempted (Okay, maybe a little, they smelled amazing!), I have a sugar free, low carb zucchini cake to snack on if I need a sweet treat, but let me tell you, the first words out of my hub's mouth were,
"These are horrible! Seriously, you can't feed these to anyone!"
In T-speak that means: these are so good that I don't want to share.
Of course, a few hours after that my baby gorillas came home from basketball practice and proceeded to devour the bars, which was also another sign of their palatability.
Seriously though, these bars are pretty easy to bake. I just poured the maple syrup on the raisins and let them soak while I was preparing the dough and preheating the oven. Fifteen minutes soaking time would be the minimum, at least that's what I think.
And on that note I shall leave you with this yummy recipe of maple-infused raisin oat goodness!
Maple Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Bars
1 cup raisins
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
1 cup butter (softened)
3/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/4 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cornstarch
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups rolled oats
1/2-1 cup of chopped nuts (optional)Place raisins in a bowl and pour maple syrup over them. Stir to really coat the raisins with the syrup.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (325 if using a metal/dark bottomed pan). Grease a 9X13 pan. If you want to get really fancy and have pretty bars, line pan with two sheets of parchment paper.
In a separate bowl, add flour, baking soda, cornstarch, cinnamon, and salt. Whisk to combine.
Cream butter and sugar in a mixing bowl. Add eggs and vanilla and mix well.
Mix in whisked dried ingredients until just combined (Don't overmix!). Then, fold in oats, soaked raisins, and nuts (if using).
Bake in preheated oven for at least 30 minutes or edges start to slightly brown. You do not want to overbake these, they set up more as they cool. I baked mine for 32 minutes and waited 15 minutes before cutting them.
Enjoy!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's maple syrup coated and never been demoted iPhone.