Jammy crumb bars are my favorite type of snacking cookies—especially when they’re vaguely disguised as health food with nuts or oats mixed into the crumb topping. The gamble with a lot of jam bars, however, is that they can end up flimsy in stature or basic in flavor. Our Whole-Wheat Apricot Bars with Almond Crumble is neither of those things.

There are two distinct elements of this recipe that caught my interest. The first is how the roasted almonds are used in the recipe. Tossing some almonds into a jam bar’s topping is nothing new, but our recipe goes beyond that. You roast the nuts, then take half and blend them directly into the flour mixture until finely ground. You’re basically blitzing the nuts into homemade almond flour, but it's super fresh, with pronounced toasted flavor notes. Not only does this add a deeply rich flavor, but the almond component contributes a beautiful mahogany color after baking. The little bits of ground nut also create break points in the dough, keeping any gluten build-up nice and short.

I was also interested in the inclusion of whole-wheat flour. Personally, I don’t know why it's not used more often in Western sweets. I once challenged myself to do all my baking with a bag of whole-wheat flour, and through cookies, pancakes, flaky biscuits, and crusts, I loved them all. Now, I’m not about to say all-purpose and whole-wheat flour are the same. They’re absolutely not. The reason I did that was to taste and feel how different they are. What I love about whole-wheat flour is the subtle earthy flavor, and the gritty feel. Yep, it’s gritty and I like it.

In this thumbprint-cookie-meets-crumb-cake bar, the combination of whole-wheat flour and blended almonds gives the bar a hearty composition and robustly nutty flavor. It’s a far cry from the weak jam bars I’ve seen around. For more fruity bar bakes, try our Sesame and Oat Bars with Dates and Dried Apricots and our spice-packed Linzer Bars.

Baking Tip of the Week: Defensive parbaking

I’m sure you’ve parbaked a crust or two, whether you know it or not. It’s when you partially bake the base crust of a recipe before you add a filling, then (usually) bake it for a second time later. It’s a key step in many recipes because it ensures the bottom shell gets fully cooked and becomes sog-resistant, like with pumpkin pie or lemon bars. Our Whole-Wheat Apricot Bars with Almond Crumble has a pressed bottom layer of almond crumb that gets parbaked early in the recipe. While most recipes give you a bake time for this step, I’d like to encourage you to practice safe, defensive parbaking by checking on the crust early.

As I mentioned before, this recipe blends almonds directly into the crust. Those, along with a good dose of sugar and a couple sticks of butter gives you a mixture that will brown and caramelize before you know it. Knowing that my bars would be returning to the oven for even more baking time, I wish I had pulled my bars about five minutes earlier. The finished bars aren’t burnt, but the bottom crust is farther along than I would have liked it when compared to the top.

This could have been much worse, but the message is the same. Check your crust early. Depending on your crusts' ingredients, how your particular oven cooks, and if your dish will be returning to the oven for a second round, you need to pull the parbaked shell when it’s just set. Yep, even if it's earlier than the suggested time. The edges might be showing a light shade of toasting, the center shouldn’t be mushy or gooey, but it also shouldn't be bone dry. If there's a high butter content then it will have softness to it with a sheen from the butter. Take it out of the oven and any residual heat from the pan will carry it over to perfect par-doneness.

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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.