A Recipe to Put Paula Deen to Shame

I've ragged on Paula and her love of butter in posts past, Gentle Reader. This recipe I tried out bright and early Saturday morning might be something she'd concoct. Or not. I only know about her cooking...style (arteriosclerosis-engendering style is more like it) from what I've gleaned from encountering her recipes every now and then, catching her on TV every now and then and, of course, from her gut-bustingly hilarious recent appearance on Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me.

The Faudie's Apple Oatmeal Bars2 C old-fashioned rolled oats
1/2 C unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 C whole wheat flour
3/4 C Clabber Girl sugar replacer OR a sugar of your choice
1/4 t NaCl
1/2 t cinnamon
3/4 C fat-free butter OR a butter product of your choice, softened to room temperature
approx. 1 C apple butter
1 Gala apple OR a cooking apple of your choice, sliced into thin wedges

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
   
2. In a large bowl, combine the oats, flour, sugar, salt and cinnamon, stirring well.
   
3. Add the butter to the oat-flour mixture, stirring to create oaty crumbles.
   
4. Prep an 8" x 8" or 9" x 9" pan with baking nonstick cooking spray or regular nonstick cooking spray.
5. Press a little more than half of the oaty crumbles into the pan to create the crust.
6. Spread a light layer (between 1/3 and 1/2 C) of apple butter atop the crust.
   
7. Place the slices of apple artfully (or not so artfully) atop the apple butter.
   
8. Spread a second light layer of apple butter atop the apples as a streusel.
   
9. Top with the remaining oaty crumbles.
   
10. Bake 30 to 35 min., or until the streusel is golden brown.

Yield: 16 bars (per the original recipe)

Nutritional Info
I have no data to share because I took a recipe I found online and modified fairly heavily. As you can see from the list of ingredients, you have a fair amount of room for making this recipe somewhat healthful and somewhat sinful. You just have to live with yourself when you're done, Gentle Reader.

Also, how you serve the bars will impact the nutritional value as well. For example, you can serve the bars naked:

Not a bad way to serve it. However, if you want to dress it up a little or, should you have a particular yen for apple pan dowdy or apple brown Betty or some kind of apple dish that isn't a pie, put a bar in some type of dish--a soup or cereal bowl, say--nuke it for about 40 seconds at full power then put a dollop of ice cream alongside it and voila! Pseudo-apple pie a la mode, seen here with a scoop of Dreyer's Nestlé Drumstick Sundae Cone ice cream.
If you want to be really decadent, you can nuke your bar, add the ice cream and add some fat-free caramel syrup:
Delish! Not to mention a very pleasing treat at the end of a long summer's day, for there's something oddly satisfying about the combination of warm, cinnamony apples and oat crumbles with cold, creamy ice cream and gooey caramel.

Future Faudie Futzings
Depending on how much you like cinnamon, you might consider putting in a full teaspoon of cinnamon, especially if your apple butter doesn't have much cinnamon flavor to it. Even though the apple butter I used does have a pretty strong cinnamon flavor, I still think I'll add more cinnamon to the crust next time.

I also might put down a thicker layer--maybe a full half-cup--of apple butter atop the crust next time. As I was enjoying my second serving last night, I was contemplating how the apple butter sort of got lost, perhaps because the base layer was too thin. If you make your bars with a thicker first layer, let me know how they turn out, Gentle Reader.