Raspberry Bars

I made some bars on Sunday.

They taste pretty good.

I'm sorry, I'm not feeling particularly talkative (writative? There's got to be a word for this.) today.

Anyway, the bars are pretty easy to make, first, you make a simple shortbread crust and bake it.

I would suggest modifying the recipe to have more butter.  They only call for a little more than one stick, but I found that overwhelmingly lacking, especially when the recipe asks you to mix in the flour until combined.  That flour will never combine with so little butter.  I broke down and used a mixer, which probably lead to my crust being too hard and crumbly.  If you're going to make this recipe, use more butter.

After you bake the crust, just mix up all the other ingredients and pour on top.

If you look closely at that picture, you'll see that some of the runny red liquid has gone behind my wax paper.  That is bad.  Despite what the recipe says, this stuff cooks up sticky, and it was a bitch getting it out of the pan when it was all cooked.  I blame the stuff behind the wax paper in particular.  Also, everything behind the wax paper is wasted topping.

Part of the process requires squeezing all the juice out of a couple cups of raspberries.  That left me with a bunch of pulp that I wasn't ready to just throw away.

I decided to use it to make some jam, since that's how I roll.  The jam was pretty easy: I just took the pulp, added the lemon zest I had leftover from the bars, some sugar, a little bit of corn starch, and finally, some of the tastiest orange juice ever:

Orange juice with lime in it!  What will they think of next?  Anyway, just boil that up until it gets thick, and throw it in a jar.  It looks like this:

and it spreads like this:

That's me making my lunch the next day.  I made all this on Sunday, and I didn't actually try the bars, because they were cooling, until Monday.  The above picture is my usual PB&J for lunch on Monday.  I don't always have PB&J for lunch, so maybe I shouldn't say usual, but it's my default if I don't have any leftovers or anything.  Now I have homemade jam to go on them, so I might step up the sandwich eating until it's gone.

Inside, the bars look nice.

Although, you can see that the crust would have been better if it had more butter.  The topping takes some getting used to: It has a nice flavor, but a weird, jelly-like texture.  I'd say that the texture gets better with time though, because it seemed a lot better on Monday than it did on Sunday.  Now it's almost Wednesday, so I'll bring the rest of the bars into work and see what everybody else has to say.

The bars are pretty nice, I'd suggest giving them a try, but they're nothing spectacular.  I'd say I'm more excited about the jam, maybe because it's a recipe I just made up, maybe it's because I like jam.