GoodCook Multi Meal Pan-Fruit Crumble Bars - SPONSORED

Fruit crumble bars have been around for a long time, but I'm going to show you a new twist on an old favorite. I'm Rachel to fall. And in this lesson, I'm not only going to share an amazing recipe for two different types of crumble bars, but I'm going to show you the amazing new pans by Good Cook. These are the best b multi meal pans. They are.

No, they have this amazing diamond pattern at the bottom which helps circulate the air underneath our crust to keep it nice and crisp but still golden and delicious. In addition, that non stick coating lets these bars come right out of the pan without any struggle. Even that first slice. This recipe is going to give our guest a choice between two different flavors of crumble bars. It's a great way to minimize your time in the kitchen but still put out a couple of different desserts.

So let's go ahead and get started with our recipe to get started with our crumble. We're going to first create our fruit filling. Now, you have a couple choices in the way of which fruits you use. And of course, whether you use fresh or frozen. So I've decided to utilize a fresh blueberry.

And the reason for the fresh blueberry here is simply, I like to have a little bit more texture and smaller fruits like berries. Um, any sort of uh any sort of berry, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, they are really going to cook down quite a bit. So if you use a frozen berry here, they are already a little decompressed. They've lost a little bit of their juice and they're not quite as plump. So I've got a fresh blueberry and I'm using a frozen cherry.

And the reason I'm using a frozen cherry is there's a couple of reasons actually, a frozen cherries are pitted already, which saves me a little bit of time. Um But cherries tend to not have a whole lot of juice as a fresh cherry. And when you freeze a berry, those juices are released as they come back to room temperature. And so you can see, I've got a lovely amount of juice in that container and that juice is going to make a delicious filling for us. The other items that you will need are two separate bowls, one for your blueberry, one for your cherry.

And in here I have both granulated sugar and some corn starch. And I'm just going to wish those together a little bit so that, that corn starch dissolves almost in the sugar. You don't want to leave any clumps or lumps and if the cornstarch gets wet before it's incorporated with other dry ingredients, you will absolutely have some lumps in there. And the next thing is going to be zest. So I like to put a little bit of either lemon or lime zest and it really depends a little bit on the fruit that you've chosen.

Either one works great. You could also do both here because we have a wonderful pan that we're using, that has two sections. You have the option to really change up both of these fruit cobblers in any way that you like. And while I'm Zing, let me tell you about this amazing Zer from Good Cook, it's fantastic because you can create both ways. So it is faster.

It, it has just, you just literally glide. You don't have to work very hard at all to get that lime or lemon zest in there. All right. So I'm just doing about half of a lemon in each of these. Give it a little shake and get that excess uh zest in the bowl and then same thing in your second bowl and don't be afraid to, you know, kind of turn your fruit a few different directions.

Make sure you get all of that beautiful zest. But one thing you don't want to do is get that white pith that's under there, that's pretty bitter. You certainly wouldn't want to do that. OK. Then you want to actually put the juice of a lemon into each of these.

Now, a good cook juicer is fantastic because it catches all of your seeds for you. You don't even have to think about it and it has an amazing poor spout is well. So we are actually looking for about a tablespoon of juice in our mixture. This is going to allow the sugar and the cornstarch to come together and that was going to be our thickening agent. So once you have those juiced, you can just use the same container, pour out one tablespoon into each of these.

Perfect. So you can see that uh one lemon has about two tablespoons in it, which is perfect for what we have going with our mixtures here and then just give them a little stir. You want to get the sugar corn starch, zest and juice combined. That's gonna again, just really help us with our thickening agent and of course, a little sweetness. Ok.

So once that's together, we're going to go ahead and add our fruit to each of these bowls. So again, this is blueberry, it's two cups and same here. We've got two cups of cherries. Now, you can see there's a lot of extra juice in the frozen berry compared to the fresh berry. Um, you may need to add additional cornstarch or as oftentimes people will use flour as well.

I know that our crust is going to absorb some of that juice as well. So I'm ok with the juice that we have in this one. And you'll notice that our blueberries don't have a whole lot of juice going yet. But after the lemon juice that's got some acidity to it. And of course, the sugar getting in contact with those berries, it will actually start to produce a little bit of juice as well.

So we're going to let these just set aside and start working on our crust mixture. Making the crust for this crumble is a really easy process, but it does take a little time depending upon how you want to approach it. So what I have here is a sugar and a baking powder mixture. Uh This is going to be our bit of leine. It's not, this is not a crust that's gonna really rise like a traditional pie crust.

Uh It's more almost like a shortbread. Um But it's very delicious into that mixture. I'm gonna also add flour and then you want to add in your butter and this is where you have a couple of choices. You can certainly cut in your butter with a fork or even a pastry blender. You can put this on the mixer with a dough hook uh or you can just use clean hands like I'm going to use um I actually find it really refreshing and fun to kind of get my hands dirty in the kitchen.

Um It gives you just this sense of something that's really truly homemade and it feels good. I like it. It makes me feel like I'm really uh making something rather than just using a bunch of uh equipment like mixers. So what you wanna do is literally just get into that dough mixture, get your butter broken up. Now, this is ice cold butter.

You want your butter to be extremely cold when you're making any sort of pie dough. Even in this case, I know this isn't necessarily a pie. It's more of a short bread, but it allows the butter to hold together a little bit and create flat pieces. And those pieces are what's going to make this crust absolutely delicious and have lots of moisture. So, just get in there with your hands, move it around.

If you have bigger chunks, you can break them up. So you can see here is a larger chunk of butter that just hasn't quite gotten broke, just smash it with your fingers and then mix it together with the flour. And then once those items come together and you have more of like pea size pieces here. We're not, we're not going for um anything larger. Uh We want it to be, you know, fairly small and we're gonna go ahead and add in two egg yolks.

So just keep working that until you get there. Once your dough has uh come together a little bit more, you're gonna add two egg yolks and the yolk is there. Uh It's got wonderful fats in it that give us lots of flavor and, um, they will break up really easily. Again, you can stir this in or you can use your hands. I'm just gonna use my whisk to get those yolks broken up and combined.

And the goal here is just to make sure you don't have any loose flour at the bottom. We don't mind if this is uh a little broken up. We're not trying to get this to come together perfectly. When we apply a little pressure to the dough in our pan, it will actually bind together and work really well. All right, just get that dough out of your whisk and we've got dirty hands.

We're going right into the pan with two thirds of this mixture. So what I'm gonna do is just give it one last little toss and then visually just eyeball of about a third and you're gonna set it in a separate bowl in this bowl. I have a little bit of granulated sugar and brown sugar. So visually just kind of taking about a third of it. This is going to turn into our crumble and let's bring our pan in.

Now, this is the good cook, multi meal pan. It's absolutely fantastic. I love it for a lot of reasons. The first reason is that it's a non stick coating, which means I don't have to spray this with additional oils or butter or anything. Um It is just going to uh release all of our beautiful crumble bars right out of the pan.

So, no greasy, it's non-stick. These pop out so easily once they're baked. And part of that is just the non-stick coating that's on there. But it also depends a little bit on your recipe. This is a butter heavy crust, which means it's got a lot of fat in there and it's just going to bake up this beautifully caramelized bottom.

All right. So I've distributed our crust within the bottom of these two cavities and I'm just gonna use the back of my hand to just give a little bit of pressure. And this is going to allow the butter flour mixture to just come together beautifully. It's gonna form a nice bottom. And if you want to, you can absolutely work some of the crust of the edge of the pan, but I don't find it necessary, especially because these bars have that beautiful fruit in there.

It creates a caramelization around the edge and it's non stick. So it pops right out. We've got two cavities and there's actually some numbers on the side of the pan, which is super helpful as well because we're making two versions of a crumble. We're doing blueberry and cherry, but that's not it. We are actually also going to do a version of the topping with oatmeal and nuts in one and just a plain crumble in the other.

And this pan is what makes your life so easy to be able to accommodate either just flavor preferences or even just something, uh, like a nut allergy or an oat allergy. Just something that, um, maybe you have a family member, maybe you have a guest coming over that can't have a certain ingredient. This allows you to be able to bake two different desserts or similar dessert with some slight changes without having to do two completely separate recipes. So that's part of why I absolutely love the versatility of this pan. It's one recipe, but two different fruit combo also gives your your guests um options, right?

Like if uh some people don't like blueberry or cherry, uh some people don't like strawberry or raspberry. This gives your guest a choice between two flavors. So hopefully everybody is happy in the end. Now that our crust is done, we're going to move this out of the way and we're going to bring in the ingredients for our crumble topping. So what we have again is a third of our crust.

We have some cinnamon oats as well as some ground up pecans. Now, you can choose to add these three into your crumble if you would like or you can leave them out, you can pick one or all of them. It's entirely up to you and how you want to customize your own crumble. So for half of our crumble, I'm just going to add some cinnamon to give it a little bit of flavor. And for our second crumble, I'm gonna add in some ingredients that could potentially be an allergy issue.

So, into our bowl, I've got a half teaspoon. If you break it down, you want a full teaspoon. But if you break it down and you just want to use a plain crumble topping, just do a half of teaspoon there. That is good. And then I'm gonna give it a little mix, just toss it together.

Just wanna make sure there's brown sugar at the bottom. There's regular granulated sugar. We've got cinnamon and of course, that crust. So just wanna make sure you get all of that combined together. Well, and what I'm gonna do instead of getting a second bowl and creating more dishes for myself, I'm actually gonna bring the fruit in.

So I have blueberries and I have cherries and I'm going to decide at this point which fruit I'm going to put with our nuts and our oats and that fruit is actually going to be the blueberry. So I'm going to go ahead and get my cherry into the pan and I'm going to go into the slightly smaller container here. Uh This pan is split almost in half. We've got one pan that's just slightly larger than the other. And what you wanna do is make sure that your fruit is spread out.

So you can see all those lovely juices are in there that is gonna make a delicious filling, but just make sure all of your fruit is spread out nicely. And then I'm gonna take half of our crumble and put that right on top. Ok? And then for this second half, I'm gonna add a quarter cup of oats and a quarter cup of our pecans. And again, just giving that a little toss and then we're gonna add our blueberries.

Now, when you are working with a potential allergen like nuts, typically, if someone has an allergy, you don't really want to utilize the same pan in case of cross contamination, but sometimes nuts are just a preference and not a true allergy. So in this case, I am using nuts in this, I would likely not recommend anyone with a nut allergy. I eat either of these because you just never know if one of those little nuts jumped ship and went over to the other side. Um But this is a nice option. If you know, maybe it's just a preference.

People don't like nuts. Um This is a great way to, again, just provide an option. So we're going to put this in the oven at 350 degrees. It's gonna take about 40 to 45 minutes to bake this off. What you're looking for is those juices to really start bubbling.

You want your top to be nice and golden brown and it may take a little bit more time if you have a lot of frozen fruit that has not been defrosted. So do keep that in mind if you're using any frozen berries, you want to let them come up to temperature. All right, let's get this in the oven. Ok. Our bars are ready and we're going to get them out of the oven.

These bars look delicious. They are hot. So please, please, please be very careful. You just want to let them set in the pan for at least 30 minutes. You can see they are nice and golden on the top and the juices are still bubbling just a little bit.

So, you know, they're going to be absolutely delicious. So this is going to set for about 30 minutes just to cool off. We'll put it in the refrigerator and then we'll pull them out and slice them up. Ok? Our crumble bars are done and chilled and I'm going to show you how easy it is to get it out of this best bake pan.

This multi meal pan by good cook is just fantastic. Uh You really don't even need to run your spatula around it. But I I'm just, I guess I'm just in such a habit of making sure that it's released. But honestly, you can get right underneath these bars and just pull it right out. Now, if you would like, you can turn this out as well.

But remember we've got a nut item here and we want to be careful that we don't um flip out nuts on to our other bar. So that is our first one. Now, you could also cut these into squares first before uh removing them from the pan. So let me show you that as well. And this because this is a non stick, it actually has a coating that is challenging to scratch.

I'm sure if you tried real hard, you could. But I have found that just gently using a knife inside of the pan, no scratches. It is just a great pan. OK? And sometimes that first one is a little tricky to get out, but not with this pan so easy.

They are just beautiful. You can get them out of the pan quickly and easily and of course, serve these up. All right now that our crumble bars are all plated. They are absolutely beautiful, super delicious. And you have to check out this amazing crust.

It is perfectly baked, it's caramelized, it is fantastic. It's got a little crunch to it still, which is lovely. And of course, the inside of these bars are just ooey, gooey and delicious. I really do credit this pan for making such a delicious bar. It has everything that you need to be able to create two different types of bars at one time.

Keep ingredients separate just in case you have a food allergy or just a food preference even. And of course, that non-stick surface just allows these bars to come out perfectly crisp on the bottom without any struggle releasing from the bottom of this pan. So I highly recommend you check out good cooks, best bake multi meal pans for making these delicious crumble bars.