Strawberry Oat Bars

Mr VST and I have been discussing doing a vegan week (more of that later) and in my search for recipes I found this one for Strawberry Oat Bars and decided to make them as I had some strawberries in the fridge. I made them with Bertolli spread though which I discovered isn't vegan as it contains whey. 

Ingredients:

(Makes 15 bars)

113g Margarine or butter (original recipe calls for half this, I was mistaken in my calculations, darn cups (!) but it worked just fine with double the amount)
120g dark brown sugar
210g whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
140g rolled oats
1/4 cup water
approx 250g strawberries, thinly sliced
50g raw sugar (I still have no real idea what this is, I used molasses sugar)

Method: 

1. Preheat the oven to 175 degrees celcius and grease a 9 inch/23cm square pan.

2. Cream together the spread and dark brown sugar.

3. Add the flour and baking powder and mix in well. 

4. Stir in the oats and water. 

5. In a separate bowl mix the sliced strawberries and raw/molasses sugar and squash the strawberries slightly so that the juice comes out. 

 6. Spread half the oat mixture thinly across the bottom of the pan. The mixture is quite thick and you will need to push it down with the back of a spoon, unless you used the original recipe which appears to make quite a dry mixture.

7. Spread the strawberries onto the mixture and then  spread the other half of the mixture on top.

8. Bake in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes until lightly browned. 

 9. Cut into bars when cooled.

These were great, despite me getting my conversions from cups to metric mixed up! They are a bit like nutrigrain bars but much better. The strawberries are the star of the show here. They form a kind of jam in the middle. I was expecting them to be a bit too sweet because of all the sugar but they weren't at all. Don't let the nutrigrain comment put you off making them!