Fruity Oaty Bars

So yeah, summer happened.

Between my baby brother’s wedding, numerous trips, out-of-town visitors, weeks of ungodly and unrelenting heat, and general life, I blinked and it was September. It was an unusually busy summer, topped only by last year’s, with the graduation and internship and job hunt and cross-country move AGAIN, but even in an average year I seem to be prone to blogging lulls during these months. Not sure why, really. Maybe the sunshine scrambles my brain.

Anyway, to make up for the lapse, here are the best oatmeal bar cookies ever. No, really. Really and truly. I know I’ve made rhubarb and oat cookies before, but as good as those were, these are a mile beyond that, and I have about a dozen testimonials to back that claim up.

The underlying cookie recipe is from my second-favorite bakery in Seattle. There’s no shame in second-favorite status either, because as good as Macrina is, there’s no way it could hope to compete with the bakery of a pastry chef who won the Coupe du Monde de Boulangerie. If you’ve never considered that the words “croissant” and “orgasmic” could belong together, you’ve either never been to Paris or never been to Bakery Nouveau. Seriously, this place is so good that I’m actually a little glad I didn’t visit it until just weeks before we moved away, because there is no way my student budget could have sustained the number of trips I would have wanted to make there, and there would have been much heartbreak.

So my point is that the basic oat bar recipe is, if not Bakery Nouveau good, still really freaking good, because the Macrina people know what they’re doing. The bottom layer is a fantastically buttery and almondy shortbread, and the oat streusel on top is just generous and crumbly enough without being ridiculously chunky or going pasty. The watermelon-pink middle layer is all my doing, a tangy-perfumy blend of rhubarb and quince jam which — I realized when making it — ends up being almost tropical and rather reminiscent of guava.

If you happened to both have the foresight to freeze some rhubarb back when it was flooding the farmers markets and have a source for quince jam, you can make this recipe as-is. If one or both of those is not an option, don’t despair. This cookie can be made with any kind of good-quality jam, and it will still be well worth the effort.

Rhubarb-Quince Oat Bars
(Adapted from Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook)
Makes 24-32 bars

For the almond shortbread:
3 tablespoons ground almonds
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 teaspoons almond extract
3/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted

For the filling:
1/4 cup granulated sugar
4 cups (around 1 pound) rhubarb, in 1/2 inch slices
1 pinch salt
1 1/2 cups quince jam

For the streusel:
1 1/4 cups light brown sugar
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 1/4 cups rolled oats
1 pinch salt
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, in 1/4 inch pieces

Toast the ground almonds in a small nonstick pan until just starting to brown and give off a warm nutty aroma. Combine the toasted almonds with the sugar and flour in a large bowl. Stir the two extracts into the melted butter, then pour the mixture over the dry ingredients and mix to create a sandy dough.

Line a quarter sheet pan with foil or parchment paper, leaving enough overhang on all sides to be able to lift the finished bars out of the pan. With your fingertips, gently press the almond dough in an even layer covering the bottom and halfway up the sides of the pan. Chill for half an hour while preparing the filling.

In a medium saucepan, combine the rhubarb, sugar, and salt. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, then lower heat and cook until the rhubarb is soft and falling apart, 10 minutes or so. Remove from the heat and stir in the quince jam.

Preheat the oven to 325. Remove the bottom layer from the fridge, top with a sheet of parchment paper, weigh it down with pie weights or dried beans to prevent puffing, and bake until light gold all over and slightly brown at the edges. Remove the top layer of parchment and the weights, and let cool a bit on a wire rack.

In another bowl, mix together the brown sugar, flour, oats and salt. Using a pastry cutter or your fingers, work in the butter until a crumbly mixture forms. Spread the filling over the almond layer, then sprinkle the oat streusel over the top, completely covering the filling.

Bake the bars on the middle rack for 35 minutes or until the top is a dark golden brown and some of the filling is bubbling around the edges. Cool completely, then use the foil or parchment lining to lift the slab onto a flat surface. Using a large knife or a pizza cutter, slice into thin bars.

Notes:

Since they’re quite rich, I like to make eight vertical slices and four horizontal ones, for a total of 32 bars, but you can be more generous if you like.  If either amount ends up being too much for your needs, leftover bars freeze very well, wrapped tightly in plastic and foil or tucked into a freezer-safe bag.

If you want to make your life a little easier, albeit less interesting, just spread the almond layer with 2-3 cups of your favorite jam, perked up with the juice of half a lemon.

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The Harbinger of Spring

After pie, the dessert His Lordship most often requests is pavlova. And, because I adore meringue in all its forms, from cookie to pie topping, the only time I say no is when the weather is so rainy or humid that working with egg whites is a recipe for failure.

Since yesterday was gorgeously sunny and mild, I readily agreed when he made the request yesterday during the weekly grocery run. My agreement was bolstered by the fact that we were in the produce section and I had spotted rhubarb, which finally convinced me that this ungodly winter is finally behind us. As we’ve established, I love all kinds of tart red fruit, but I have a special soft spot for rhubarb (technically not a fruit, but if it quacks like a duck…) because, like asparagus, it’s the earliest spring produce, bringing with it promises of berries, tomatoes, corn and peaches to come.

If you’ve never had one before, I suppose you could describe pavlova as the ultimate meringue. Unlike the cookie, pavlovas are not crisp all the way through, just on the outside. Underneath a thin, crackly exterior, the inside stays melting and soft, like a flourless angel food cake or the most delicate marshmallow. This already-lovely meringue base is then topped with whipped cream and whichever fresh fruit you fancy. It’s usually made as one giant cake-like disk that is served in wedges, but unless I’m making it for a big crowd of dinner guests, I prefer to make individual-sized ones.

These mini-pavlovas were topped with a compote of rhubarb stewed with a bit of orange peel and spiked with Triple Sec, then mixed with uncooked blackberries and strawberries. The berries were obviously not local, but after all those months of cold and snow and misery, I just really needed them. If you’re more virtuous than I am, you can just hang on to this recipe until they start coming up where you are.

Rhubarb-Berry Pavlovas
(Adapted from Mini-Pavlovas in Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess and Stewed Rhubarb in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone)
Makes 9 individual-sized pavlovas

For the meringues:

4 large egg whites
Pinch of salt
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon white wine or cider vinegar

For the fruit:

3/4 pound rhubarb, sliced in 1-inch pieces
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon dried orange peel or zest of one fresh orange
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons Triple Sec or other orange liqueur
1 pint each strawberries and blackberries

For the cream:

1 pint heavy whipping cream
2 tablespoons granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 F and line a baking sheet with parchment.

In a scrupulously clean mixer bowl and with an equally spotless whisk attachment, beat the egg whites and the pinch of salt until firm, but not stiff, peaks form. Continue beating, gradually adding the sugar by the spoonful, until you achieve a satiny meringue. Gently fold in the cornstarch, vanilla and vinegar until just combined.

Using an ice cream scoop or two large spoons, drop the meringue into nine equal mounds on the sheet. Use a spoon to smooth the mounds into round, flat-topped disks around four inches in diameter.

Put the meringues in the oven and immediately lower the heat to 300 F. Bake for 30 minutes, until they’re crisping on the outside but otherwise still pale and marshmallowy. Turn the oven off and leave them for another 30 minutes, then remove to a wire rack to cool.

While the meringues are baking and cooling, combine the rhubarb, 1/3 cup sugar, orange peel and water in a medium saucepan and simmer until the rhubarb is tender but still intact, approximately 10 minutes. When the rhubarb has cooled to room temperature, hull and quarter the strawberries and stir into the rhubarb with the Triple Sec and blackberries.

In a mixer or by hand with a whisk, beat the cream with the sugar until softly whipped.

To assemble the pavlovas, flip a meringue belly-up onto a plate, and dollop with the cream.  Top with the rhubarb compote and berries.  Serve immediately.

Notes:

Since pavlovas are so popular around here, I generally make enough of these mini ones to eat over the course of two or three days. Once baked, the meringues will keep quite well in an airtight container for that long, and if they do get soft, you can crisp them back up for about 30 minutes in an oven preheated to 300 F and then turned off.

If that’s still too much meringuey goodness for your needs, the recipe can easily be halved to make 4-5 individual pavlovas.

The color on my meringues is a sign that I am long overdue for getting a new oven thermometer. Like meringue cookies, pavlovas should really be snowy white, in homage to the tulle costumes of ballerina Anna Pavlova, for whom the dessert was invented. My oven is having issues in the mid range, because I’m finding it a little too slow from 350 and up, and now it’s clearly too high from 325 down. The browning doesn’t affect the taste, but it does throw the aesthetics off, at least until you pile the cream over it.

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Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Strawberry-Rhubarb Bars

As I mentioned previously, one of my finds at the farmer’s market this weekend was rhubarb, another later-in-life love. I don’t think I ever had it until well into adulthood, but as with cranberries, I fell hard and completely, and when it’s in season, I snatch up all I can and freeze some for the rest of the year. For the inaugural rhubarb recipe of 2006, I decided a bar cookie might be nice, with a sweet-tart layer of rhubarb sandwiched between two buttery layers of cookie dough.

In order to develop this recipe, I combined and modified components from two separate recipes. On the one hand, I had a recipe for a strawberry-rhubarb bar in The All-American Cookie Book, but the oat-and-nut-fortified dough from a raspberry bar recipe in my latest cookbook acquisition, The New Best Recipe by the America’s Test Kitchen chefs, sounded much better than the plain short pastry dough in the original cookie. I decided to combine the two and hope that the combination of the superior elements would result in a superior bar cookie.

The end product of this tinkering was not perfect, because the filling was a bit too loose and the cookies don’t have quite enough structural integrity to cut as cleanly as I’d like. The flavor is great, though, and I like the firm but tender texture and the toasty nuttiness of the dough. Next time, I may fiddle with the amount of thickener, or possibly try a different kind of, or slightly less, jam. With a bit more work, this could go from a very nice but homey cookie to a refined and suitable addition to a springtime tea tray.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Bars
Makes 24 1×2-inch cookies

Filling
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 lb rhubarb, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 10-oz jar (1 1/4 cups) strawberry jam
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Grated zest of one orange

Crust and Streusel Topping
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups rolled oats
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts
1 1/2 sticks (12 tablespoons) unsalted butter, slightly softened, cut into 12 pieces

In a heavy, nonreactive saucepan, stir together the sugar, cornstarch and cinnamon until evenly distributed. Stir in the rhubarb, jam and orange zest and bring to a simmer. Cook, stirring frequently, until the rhubarb begins to soften, approx. 6-8 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Place the oven rack in the lower two-thirds position and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8-inch square baking pan with two strips of parchment paper or nonstick aluminum foil, letting the strips overhang the edges of the pan to serve as a sling for removing the cookies later.

In a mixer, mix the flour, oats, granulated and brown sugar, baking soda, salt and walnuts at low speed for 30 seconds. Add the butter, continuing to mix on low speed until the mixture is well
blended and resembles wet sand.

Press two-thirds of the dough into the bottom of the pan and bake until it starts to brown, about 20-25 minutes. Spread the strawberry-rhubarb filling over the crust and sprinkle the remaining crumb mixture evenly over the filling. Bake until the filling bubbles around the edges and the top is golden brown, approximately 35 minutes, rotating once during baking.

Cool on a wire rack until room temperature, approximately 1 1/2 hours. Remove the cookies from the pan by lifting the edges of the foil or parchment, and cut into squares.

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