Cranberry Streusel Bars

Happy New Year!!! Hope your holidays were filled with fun, food, friends, family, and some wonderful memories 🙂 I have lots of fun, family pics taken during our brief but fabulous vacation with our family in Nebraska – so keep checking back for those.

This week, I decided that I would go through my Pinterest account and do some organizing 🙂 How many of us pin recipes like crazy only to have them languishing on our boards, tempting us but not enough to actually make them? So, I am going through several recipes this week, trying them out and either discarding or keeping them.

The first of such experiments happens to be this easy to make Cranberry Streusel Bar recipe from Mrs. Happy Homemaker. These bars are tasty (I am chomping on one right now), look pretty, and will impress your guests to no end. And, if you don’t serve them or give them away quickly, you will definitely eat them all, with no regrets whatsoever. Read on for the recipe.
Here is the difficult (not) part – the Recipe:

INGREDIENTS

1 can cranberry sauce ( I used the whole cranberries)
1/4 cup white sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup quick oats
1 stick butter, softened
3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
1/4 teaspoon salt
Chopped walnuts (optional)

METHOD

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9×13 inch baking pan.

In a small saucepan, combine the cranberry sauce and the white sugar on medium heat, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, oats, brown sugar and salt and mix well.  Add the stick of softened butter, and using your fingers, mix it well with the dry ingredients until the flour mixture looks crumbly. Add walnuts at this point. I forgot and just pressed some in on the top before I stuck it in the oven.

Spread 2 cups of the streusel topping into the greased baking pan, and press down firmly. Using a spatula, spread the cranberry mixture over the crust. Sprinkle the remaining streusel topping over the cranberry mixture.

Bake for 30 minutes, until the crust is lightly browned. Cool completely (the most difficult part because you are dying to stuff a few bars in your mouth) and then cut them in any size you want.

Enjoy!