These bars involve no fancy ingredients. You don’t have to know how to temper eggs or anything. They are straightforward and will not add to your stress level.
- 2 2/3 cups (320 g) all-purpose flour
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ¼ teaspoon fresh-grated nutmeg – OK, yes. Trust me; grating it yourself is very much better than the powdered stuff you’ve had since the Obama administration.
- 1 cup (two sticks) butter
- ½ cup (106 g) brown sugar
- ¼ cup (50 g) white sugar, or as you might know it, “sugar”
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
12 ounces (340 g) jam. It can be any jam. Whatever kind you like. If you feel like playing around, grab a small jar of something cool when you’re picking up peanut butter at the store. Check the net weight at the bottom of the label. Most small jars of jam are very close to 340 grams. “Apricot jam?” you might ask yourself. Sure, why not? “Raspberry?” That sounds delicious, but maybe get the seedless stuff. “Grapefruit marmalade?” You do you.
(For this batch, I used a small jar of ‘Orange Jam”’ that had chunks of orange peel in it, which I picked up at a Middle Eastern market. I suspect it is pretty much orange marmalade with a Lebanese accent.)
Preheat your oven to 325°F.
Crumple up a sheet of parchment paper — really wad it up like it owes you money or something. Then open it up and smooth it out. Use it to line an 8×8” baking pan. It’s easy to overthink how to line a pan neatly. With what I call the “Crump-It-and-Dump-It” method, you can check that tiny bit of anxiety off your list.
In a mixing bowl, whisk the flour, salt and nutmeg together and set it aside.
Let’s face it: You probably decided to make Jam Bars on the spur of the moment and didn’t think to leave a couple sticks of butter out to soften up, did you? This is another baking anxiety you can let go of. You’re going to cream the butter and sugar together anyway, so just beat the butter with your mixer for a couple of minutes to soften it up, then add the sugars and beat it until the mixture is light and fluffy, then beat in the vanilla.
Turn the mixer down to its lowest setting, and spoon the flour mixture into the butter mixture, and mix everything until it forms a dough. Leave a quarter of the dough in the mixing bowl, then drop the other three quarters into your parchment paper-lined baking pan. (The “Dump” stage of “Crump and Dump”* system), and smoosh it to cover the bottom of the pan. Make sure you get it in the corners.
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until it puffs up a bit, then remove it from the oven.
Scoop your jam (what kind did you end up going with?) on top of the half-baked dough, and spread it around with the back of a spoon or an offset spatula. Break the remaining dough blob into tiny, fingertip-sized bits, and cover the jam with them.
Return the pan to the oven, and bake for 45 to 60 minutes, until the jam bubbles and the dough has turned golden brown.
Cool in the pan, then cut into nine pieces, tic-tac-toe style. Eat warm or cold, topped with ice cream, or buck naked. Err, the jam bar, I mean. But again, whatever reduces your stress is good for all of us.
*I should trademark that.
Featured photo: Jam bars. Photo by John Fladd.