Recipe review: Recipe Runner’s Strawberry Breakfast Bars

I don’t have the best relationship with mornings.

Well, early mornings, anyway. I just don’t sleep well enough for them. I’ve found that my most productive days happen after I’ve been able to sleep until about 9 or 10 (sometimes 8) after going to bed at about 11 or 12 the night before.

But, my weekdays don’t work out that way. My job starts at 8 in the morning, so I need to be up by about 6:15 in order to be ready and out the door on time. That means I need to be in bed by about 9:30 or 10 if I want even a glimmer of hope of getting enough sleep.

I’ve become more accustomed to that than I used to be. Most days, it’s usually not too difficult to get up, though I do have to talk myself into it.

But other days, I have a really hard time dragging myself out of bed. It takes me longer, which means something else in my morning routine needs to be either cut short or scrapped.

Usually I choose to cut down my breakfast time. Instead of sitting down and eating a bowl of cereal or some sort of toasted bread, I’ll grab something quick that I can either eat in the car or at work.

And that long, likely uninteresting explanation brings me to today’s recipe review.

Recipe Runner’s Strawberry Breakfast Bars caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First, they looked really good. And second, they sounded like the sort of thing I could put together on a Sunday afternoon and save to eat throughout the week. They were the exact type of grab-and-go breakfast I had been craving.

And, as it turns out, they were pretty easy to make. The recipe tells you to gradually add things to your blender. Then you press half of that mixture into a pan, spread jam (either homemade or store-bought) over the top, and press the remainder of the mixture into the jam. Bake it, cut it, and you’re ready to go.

That being said, I did have one problem with the recipe: blending everything together wasn’t as easy as the recipe made it sound.

When I got to the point of adding the butter, yogurt, and vanilla, I started having difficulties. I had to turn the blender off, mix everything with a spoon, then turn the blender back on. And I had to do that multiple times before I could move onto the next step.

Then I had the same problem. The whole blender issue added a lot more time to the recipe than I was expecting.

Now, that could have been caused by a problem with my blender, and it’s entirely possible that you won’t have the same troubles. But the next time I make this recipe, I’m planning on dumping the mixture into a bowl after reaching the butter step and just mixing everything by hand from that point forward.

Despite my trouble with the blender, though, this is definitely a recipe I want to try again. Next time, I’ll use a little less jam (I found the bars a bit too sweet), and I’d eventually like to try switching out the strawberry jam with a different kind. Blackberry jam, in particular, is calling out to me.

To sum it up…