Bramble Bars

I love this time of year.  It’s almost time for crumbles and custard again!  I’ve been watching the blackberries in the field near our house grow over the summer every time I walked Bungle (Walked?  Who am I kidding?  He drags me around that bloody field), and now they’re finally ripe and ready for picking.   I decided to pick a few last week, but instead of going with a bog-standard apple and blackberry crumble, I did something a little bit different and made these Bramble Bars.  They’re basically a flapjack, blackberry and frangipane sandwich 🙂

Bramble Bars

Ingredients

For the Flapjacks:

• 250g porridge oats
• 125g butter
• 125g dark brown sugar
• 2 tbsp golden syrup
• 1 tbsp peanut butter

For the Frangipane:

• 75g butter
• 75g caster sugar
• 75g ground almonds
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 egg (beaten)
• 100g ripe blackberries
• white chocolate icing

1. First, make the flapjack layers.  Heat the butter, brown sugar, syrup and peanut butter on a low heat, stirring until combined.  Mix in the porridge oats and then transfer half the mixture to a greased and lined, rectangular baking tin.  Bake for 15 minutes at 180° .
2. Next make the frangipane.  Cream together the butter and sugar, then stir in the eggs, ground almonds and almond extract.  Spread evenly on top of the first flapjack layer, then bake for 15 minutes.
3. Roughly mash the blackberries and then spoon over the baked frangipane layer.  Add the final flapjack layer on top, then return to the oven for a further 15 minutes until golden brown.
4. Once cooled, cut into bars and decorate with piped white chocolate.

Not to blow my own horn or anything, but Sunny was all over these and actually forced me to take pictures of them immediately so he could scoff them.  It’s a nice way of using up those blackberries without resorting to the bog-standard crumble.  😉

Side-note; we discovered that Bungle loves blackberries.  So now instead of getting dragged around the field, I’m being dragged into hedges instead.  Grrrrreat.

Have a lovely week everyone!  ♡