Greetings from my parents’ house. Mr. A and I will be here for the next few days celebrating Christmas with my family. My heart is so full of love and joy being here that it’s nearly bursting at the seams. I’ve been spending my morning baking while my Mom and Dad slave away at work. But before everyone gets home and we celebrate with our traditional Christmas Eve dinner, I wanted to share one more recipe with you (that actually would work perfectly for Christmas).
Since my grandparents have a difficult time getting to my parents’ house for Christmas, for the last couple years we’ve gone out to their retirement community a few days before Christmas to celebrate. My grandparents have gotten to the point that they don’t really want more gifts taking up precious real estate in their apartment. So I decided that I would bake them a little gift, instead of filling their place with more stuff.
Their joint love of fruit based baked goods led to the creation of this cranberry orange crumble bar recipe–which is sweet and tart just like them (yes, I’m totally suck up right now Grandad 
)
Cranberry Orange Crumble Bars
Ingredients:
- 5 ounces dried cranberries
- 2 cups orange juice (fresh squeezed is best-I used the juice from 3 oranges)
- 1 tablespoon orange zest
- 1 1/2 cups almonds, sliced
- 1 cup rolled oats
- 1/4 cup coconut oil
- 1/3 cup brown sugar
Method:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Bring a saucepan to medium heat. Add dried cranberries, orange juice, and orange zest. Bring to a boil and then allow to simmer for 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, add almond slices, rolled oats, coconut oil, and brown sugar to food processor. Process until the almonds have broken down into a meal.
Prepare a 9X9 pan. Spoon half of almond mixture into pan. Press mixture firmly into pan with your fingers.
Spread cranberry mixture evenly across the almond layer.
Then sprinkle the rest of the almond mixture over cranberries.
Place in oven for 40 minutes.
Remove from oven and allow to cool completely before slicing (unless of course you want a crumble–then just dig right in).
Even though they can’t be with us this Christmas, I hope that my grandparents will think of us when munching on these treats today (or at least that my grandmother won’t give my grandfather a hard time for getting crumbs everywhere–he can’t help it Grandma, men are just messy)
I’m planning on dropping by tomorrow to share some pictures from our Christmas festivities but in case you all don’t have time to pop in I just want to wish you and yours the very merriest of Christmases. I hope that your home is full of joy, cheer, and more love than you could ever imagine.
Merry Christmas and Much Love,
Mr. and Ms. Adams
