Healthy Breakfast Blueberry Oatmeal Crumb Bars

These easy Healthy Breakfast Blueberry Oatmeal Crumb Bars are perfect for breakfast, snack or dessert and are suitable for people who follow the Paleo diet or love clean eating.

There are so many reasons to love summer, but one of the biggest highlights for me is the abundance of fresh, local fruit and vegetables. That produce may be coming from your own garden or a neighbor’s, a local pick your own or a farmer’s market. I’m really happy to find more and more locally grown foods being available in the fresh produce section of grocery store chains.

Why make just a simple pie, when you can enjoy these Healthy Breakfast Blueberry Oatmeal Crumb Bars which can easily be made with just a few ingredients?

Infinitely easier than pie, serves a crowd, and so fantastically good, you just can’t go wrong with these bars.

I’ve been playing around this week with various recipes to make the perfect Healthy Breakfast Blueberry Oatmeal Crumb Bars. And after a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled on this recipe, that my family and I really enjoy.  It’s made with an oatmeal base, which is pressed to form the bottom layer of the bars and is also used as a crumble topping.

This recipe has a divine blueberry filling, which can be made with either fresh blueberries, which are readily available this time of year or frozen when you can’t get fresh.  It’s mostly just sweetened with the berries, and if need be, this filling can be sweetened up a bit, with the addition of golden syrup. I’ll bet you have all the ingredients you need to make them in your pantry right now.

I thought that there was no way I could make a healthy version of this sugar, butter and jam loaded classic. You just simply can’t replace white sugar and butter with maple syrup and coconut oil and expect the bars to come out the same. It just wouldn’t work right. But these bars are really quite flexible and turned out amazing.

Just the right dessert for a simple, all year round, after meal treat, when you have family or friends around if I do say so myself.  And, if a scoop of vanilla ice cream happens to appear in each of the serving bowls too, I doubt that anyone will complain about that either.

How to Make Healthy Breakfast Blueberry Oatmeal Crumb Bars

To start off, preheat your oven to 350F degrees. Then line an 8×8 inch baking tray with baking parchment and grease with a little vegetable oil.

Using a large bowl, mix together the flour, oatmeal, granulated sugar, 1/4 cup of brown sugar, ground cinnamon, and salt. Now add the melted butter & egg yolk and stir.

Remove about 1 cup of the mixture and put aside for use later in the recipe.

Press the remaining mixture into the bottom of the prepared pan and using the bake of a spoon, level out.

Now in another bowl, mix together all the ingredients to make the blueberry part of the recipe. When this ready spoon over on top of the oatmeal cookie mixture in the pan.

Add to the cup of oatmeal mixture that we set aside earlier, 1 additional tablespoon of brown sugar. Do not skip this step, as it makes all the difference to the finished dish. Top the blueberry layer with this crumble mixture and smooth over the top. The crumble mix should be quite lumpy so as to add texture to the bars.

Place the tray in the preheated oven and bake for about 40-45 minutes or until the blueberries start to bubble and the top of the crumble is a golden brown. The baking time will be a little longer, about 10 to 15 minutes more if you have used frozen blueberries in place of fresh blueberries.

Allow the Healthy Breakfast Blueberry Oatmeal Crumb Bars to cool fully to room temperature (around 3 hours) before cutting into the bars as they are easiest to cut when they’re cold and using a sharp knife.