Jam Oatmeal Cookie Bars

The other day I was preparing some food to take to a colleague and his wife.  He had a knee surgery scheduled and a few days beforehand, his wife broke her leg.  So they were neither one in the position to be cooking.  I made them a couple of casseroles to put into the freezer until needed and since I had the ingredients to make these scrumptious cookie bars, I made them as well.

Unfortunately, I am not sure where I got this recipe.  The one thing I do remember is that according to the recipe you could use any flavor of cake mix and match it up with a great flavor of jam.  Since our sugar-free cake mixes only come in yellow and chocolate, I made a change to the recipe and have added a box of sugar-free Jell-o powder mix to change the flavor of the cake to coordinate with your flavor of jam.

For this recipe, I had a jar of sugar-free raspberry jam.  Smucker's makes several sugar-free flavors and you can get a few flavors in generic form.  As we have talked about before, fruit has natural sugars, but I looked on the label and this is really sugar free jam.  So this is a true  Sugar-Free  recipe.  For the whole recipe, you need the following ingredients:

• sugar-free yellow cake mix
• sugar-free Jell-o powder
• 2 1/2 c. oats
• 3/4 c. (1 1/2 sticks) I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, melted
• 1 jar sugar-free jam

So as I mentioned above, this time I had a jar of sugar-free raspberry jam and some raspberry Jell-o.  In the past, I have made peach, orange and strawberry.  So far, I have always matched my flavors.  But I think some coordinating would be good as well; lime-strawberry, orange-pineapple, strawberry-peach...well, I could go on and on.

 Heat oven to 365 degrees.  Grease or spray a 13 x 9 pan.  Stir together the cake mix, gelatin powder and oats.  Stir in melted butter until mixture is crumbly; just make sure everything is moist.  Measure out 3 cups of the mixture and press it evenly in your pan.

 Spread the entire jar of jam evenly over the mixture base.  Then, sprinkle the remaining crumbly mixture evenly over the top.  Use the palm of your hand and gently press crumbs into the jam.  Bake for 25 minutes or until lightly browned.  Mixture will not look completely done when you remove it from the oven because the jam is so warm.

Cool completely in the pan on a cooling rack.  Cut into squares.  If you have trouble waiting until it is cool...it will taste wonderful... you just won't be able to pick it up and you will have to use a fork... not that there is anything wrong with that...  just sayin'!

Note:  This recipe does make enough for a 9 x 13 pan.  Since I was making for a friend, I divided mine and made half for him and half for us.  That is why you only see a square pan in the picture.