Oatmeal Crush: PB Oatmeal Bars

My huge love affair with oatmeal isn't only limited to the breakfast table, I also try to include oatmeal in dishes for other times of the day.  I made these bars for dessert when we had a friend over for dinner.

Inspiration

Mix It Up Funfetti Baked Oatmeal Bars

I think I might actually have the sprinkles this recipe calls for, but I was too lazy to haul my butt up to the top of the pantry to check my baking supplies to be sure.  Plus I wanted to do something a little different.  Instead of sprinkles I added some powdered peanut butter to the batter and pressed some Trader Joe's mini peanut butter cups into half of the batch. I also switched out the maple syrup for brown sugar since our kitchen lacks maple syrup (I admit it, we tried it and didn't like it!). 

Ingredients

• 2 cups rolled oats
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup applesauce (4 oz. cup)
• 1/2 cup Greek yogurt
• 1 cup water
• 2/3 cup milk
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 tsp brown sugar
• 4 T PB2 powdered peanut butter, chocolate-peanut butter flavor
• 1/2 banana, sliced into small chunks
• 1/3 to 1/2 cup mini peanut butter cups 

Directions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Coat an 8x8 pan with cooking spray.

These guys are in there.

Mix all the ingredients and dump it in the pan.

Raw batter in the oven.  Apparently we were
having an earthquake at the time, hence the shaky look. 

 Bake for 40 minutes or until not gooey in the center. 

Bit of chocolate goodness on the top there. 

Verdict

Boring with dull flavor.

I liked these well enough, but the powdered peanut butter I added didn't add much flavor.  The bars with the mini peanut butter cups were the only tasty ones in the pan so I topped the rest of the pieces with a smear of peanut butter when we ate them.  They need more of something -- a strong ingredient (chocolate, coffee, more banana) or at least more sugar -- to be more interesting.

I don't know if they need to be kept in the fridge, but I figured with the yogurt in the batter they should be, and the flavor is really dull when they're cold.   
The original recipe had it baking for only 25-27 minutes, but at that point mine certainly wasn't even close to done. I ended up adding 15 more minutes, for be a total baking time of 40 minutes. I don't think my oven is way off since I haven't had other recipes lately that needed to be cooked more, but who knows.  The photos on the original website show the bar looking thinner than mine, hers look to be about only 1 inch thick at the most while mine were more like 2+ inches.