Oatmeal Bars - Happy Mole Day

Oatmeal bars decorated to look like mole tunnels through dirt and grass

My daughter needed a desert for a Friday school party, who knew it's National Mole Day - a huge thing for chemistry students.  It's the celebration of Avogadro's Number or 10 to the 23rd power or October 23rd.  Since that would be Saturday this year, the party is on Friday.

I was going to make mole cupcakes but lost track of time and forgot to buy ingredients so we went with grass and mole tunnels on top of a frosted pan of oatmeal bars. 

This is my all purpose oatmeal bar prepared in huge quantities.  It's hard to make something for a special occasion for one kid and not have enough for the rest so I usually quadruple recipes.

In a very large mixing bowl:

Melt 1 pound of butter/4 sticks and let cool so as not to cook the eggs in the next step.

Add in:
4 cups of flour - any combination of white or wheat
2 cups of white sugar
2 cups of brown sugar
2 tsp of baking soda
2 tsp of salt
2 tsp of cinnamon
4 tsp of vanilla
4 large eggs

Stir to combine, no need to haul out the mixer, a large spoon/spatula works here.

Add in 6 to 7 cups of oats plus 2 more cups of a combination of choices.

For this batch, I chopped up 1 cup of pecans plus 1 cup of sweetened coconut and 1/2 cup of dried cranberries.

This is a very forgiving recipe.  Add 7-9 cups, mostly oats plus stuff.  Consider chocolate chips, different nuts, different dried fruit, pureed raisins, white chocolate chips, it's all good.

Preheat oven to 350F and spray pans with Pam.  With this volume, you'll have enough batter for one of the following:

1 12X18 pan, or
2 9X13 pans, or
4 8X8 pans

I couldn't find my second 9X13 pan so I used 1 9X13 and 2 8X8s.  Usually I would prepare this in a 12X18 but part of this is for my daughter to take to school so I used a medium pan with a plastic lid for easy travel.

Bake for 25-30 minutes or so until lightly browned and cooked through.  Let cool on a rack. 

Because this was a special occasion, I frosted the 9X13 with chocolate cream cheese frosting and decorated the top with green colored coconut and crushed graham crackers. Otherwise, I would leave them plain as baked and cut into bars to serve.  There is usually enough to freeze and put away until later.

Astrid