For all of you who somehow don’t know….Downton Abbey Season 4 premieres TOMORROW!!! Watch this for me real quick-

Is it just me, or isn’t that the most mysterious, non-helpful trailer ever? Talk about vague.

Anyway,  we were invited to a Downton Abbey premiere watching party – yay! We signed up to bring dessert and these raspberry bars seemed perfect to share on this momentous occasion. These. Are. Delicious. We’ve tried a lot of similar recipes (see Fresh Strawberry Oatmeal Bars) but for some reason these stand out as our favorite. There is a perfect amount of crumb topping and they are overall amazing.

I’m not sure if we’ve talked about it before on the blog, but we store all of our recipe clippings in large three-ring binders. When we try a new recipe, we decide if it’s a “keeper” or not, a.k.a. whether it has earned a permanent spot in a binder. This raspberry bar recipe is definitely a “keeper”.

Raspberry Bars

2 sticks butter, softened
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 cup old fashioned oats, or rolled oats
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 cup raspberry preserves, I used seedless
Sliced almonds, optional

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter an 8-inch square baking pan. I just used the excess butter leftover on the butter wrapping, and smeared it around.

Add the flour, both sugars, oats and salt to a bowl in your stand mixer. Add in the butter and egg and beat at low speed. Stop the machine and scrape the bowl down a couple of times. Keep processing until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Keep 2 cups crumb mixture aside.

Press the remaining crumb mixture on the bottom the prepared pan. Spread the Raspberry Preserves over the top of the crust. Crumble the rest of the oat mixture over the preserves and then I sprinkled approximately 1/4 cup of sliced almonds over the top of that. I loved the addition of the almonds. They gave the bars a yummy extra texture and looked really pretty.

Bake until lightly browned, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool completely before cutting into bars.

Cindy & Jordan