On my quest to get the family eating healthier, we have stopped eating fast food. Well, all except my husband, who would still stop in for breakfast in one of those places every morning. He always gets up right before he has to leave, which doesn’t leave him time to fix something for breakfast. Even though we have things here that can be fixed quickly, he just doesn’t have the time. So I decided that I needed to come  up with something that would taste good and be handheld so that he could just grab it on the way out the door and eat it in the car.

I saw these on an episode of the Pioneer Woman’s new show on Food Network a couple of weeks ago and thought they would be perfect for breakfast. They are very simple to make and only take about 40 minutes between prep and cook time. They are absolutely delicious. You can use any type of fruit you want for the filling. I bought strawberry and blackberry organic preserves for mine. Everyone loved these and they make a perfect on the go breakfast, as well as an amazing topping for vanilla ice cream for dessert, as you can see in this picture. He took vanilla ice cream and added in a banana, caramel and crumbled up these bars all over the top. It. Was. Deeeelicious.

I also added ground flax seed for the added health benefits. You can leave this out if you want, but it is really good for your body. I didn’t even tell my family I added this in there and they never even noticed.

I made the strawberry version two weeks ago and last night I made the blackberry ones for this week.

Breakfast Fruit Bars

• 1 3/4 sticks salted butter, cut into pieces, plus more for greasing pan
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cup oats
• heaping 1/4 cup flax seed, ground fine (optional)
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• one 12-ounce jar fruit preserves

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Thoroughly butter a 9-by-13-inch rectangular pan.

Mix together the butter, flour, oats, brown sugar, baking powder, flax seed and salt.I used my pastry blender to mix it all up and then ended up just using my hands to make sure everything was well blended.

It should look like this when your done.

Press half the oat mixture into the prepared pan.

For both of the preserves I used, I emptied them into a bowl first and used a small spreader to mix them up really well before spreading on the oat mixture. They were both so thick coming out of the jar, that doing this made it easier to spread it across.

Spread with the strawberry preserves.

Then sprinkle the other half of the oat mixture over the top and pat lightly to cover the entire pan.

Bake until light brown, between 30 to 40 minutes depending on your oven. Mine were in there for 35 and it was perfect. Let cool completely, and then cut into squares.

These are the strawberry ones.

These are the blackberry.