Yup, That’s My Jam! These easy jam bars travel well and are an excellent addition to brown bag lunches during the week. Layered with oats, nuts, and jam, they’re also a very handy, mess-free breakfast bar on the go.
Over the years we’ve made this delicious jam streusel bar recipe in many flavors. Some of our favorites are spiced peach, strawberry rhubarb, and strawberry zucchini. The only real change to each recipe is to alter the flavor of jam, and the type of nuts used. You can use walnuts, pecans, or slivered almonds.
While the bottom and top layers of the bars are made with the same ingredients, they actually bake differently. The top layer is light and crispy, while the bottom layer is soft and chewy. With the perfect amount of jam in the middle to add a burst of flavor, I guess that’s why these streusel bars are definitely my jam!
Bars:
You’ll Need:
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup Old Fashioned oatmeal
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter or shortening, softened
1 egg
1 1/4 cups of blackberry, strawberry, raspberry or any flavor jam EXCEPT freezer jam
Topping:
1/4 c. White flour
1/4 c. Whole Wheat Flour
1/4 c. Old Fashioned Oats
1/4 c. butter
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Heat oven to 350°F. Line the bottom of an 8″x8″ pan with foil, or parchment paper. This helps make it easier to lift the bars out to evenly cut them once they’re done baking.
Prepare the base of the jam bar. Add white and wheat flours, sugar, oatmeal, butter, and egg, to a medium-size mixing bowl and mix with an electric mixer on low speed until crumbly. Using your fingers or the back of a spoon, press the bar dough into the bottom of the prepared pan.
Spread your choice of Jam evenly over the dough, this time around I’m using homemade blackberry jam.
In a small bowl combine 1/4 cup White flour, 1/4 cup Whole Wheat Flour, 1/4 cup Old Fashioned Oats, mixing well. Cut in 1/4 cup butter. Add the 1/2 cup chopped walnuts. Crumble this mixture generously over the top of the bars.
Bake for 40-45 minutes, or until golden brown, cool completely before cutting. Makes 12 bars
If you’d like you can add a drizzle of glaze over the top to make the bars prettier by combining 1/2 c. powdered sugar with just enough milk or water to make a thin glaze, then drizzle it over the top of the cooled bars. It’s my own personal preference not to add this extra sugar, the bars are sweet enough on their own with the jam. But the glaze does look pretty!
Budget101.com Breakdown:
This breakdown is based on normal grocery store prices. If you’d like to know precisely how we figure each amount, check out how to calculate the cost of a recipe.
Flour .10
Wheat Flour .14
Oats .07
Butter .75
sugar .15
walnuts .30
Jam .50
egg .08
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Total recipe $2.09 = .17 cents per serving
To prepare these delicious jam bars even cheaper per serving by making your own jams/jellies. For example, in this batch you see above, I used homemade Blackberry Jam. It was 97¢ to make 6 jars of homemade blackberry jam.
The blackberries were wild & we picked them for free, the pectin in the jam was marked down to 10¢ a container at the end of the season last year. If you raise chickens, as we do, your eggs will be free as well (provided you feed them naturally & don’t have to purchase food).
Our Cost Breakdown:
Our actual cost for this recipe was just 11¢ per serving:
Flour .10
wheat flour .14
oats .07
butter .75
sugar .15
walnuts – free from the tree we harvested from last year
Jam .16
egg- free
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Total Cost of Recipe $1.37 or .11 per serving
