Vegetarian Honey-Nutmeg Apple Crumble Bars
Warm spiced apples, golden crumble, and a drizzle of honey — these bars hit every note you want from a fall-inspired bake. The filling layers thinly sliced fresh apples with honey and nutmeg, creating a jammy, fragrant center that bubbles up beautifully between a pressed oat crust and a scattered crumble topping. Rice flour and tapioca starch do the heavy lifting in the base, giving the bars a tender, slightly crisp texture that holds together cleanly when sliced. Cold butter worked into the dry ingredients is the key move here — those small pea-sized pieces melt in the oven and create that irresistible, craggy crumble everyone fights over. The parchment overhang trick makes lifting and cutting the slab genuinely foolproof, so you get neat, bakery-worthy bars without any wrestling with the pan. They're completely free of meat, fish, and anything that would raise a flag for someone eating plant-forward, relying entirely on eggs-free, wholesome pantry staples. Serve them slightly warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or pack them up as-is — either way, they disappear fast.
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Learn more →Ingredients
9 servings
For the crust and crumble
- 1 cup rolled oats
- ¾ cup rice flour
- ¼ cup tapioca starch
- ¼ cup granulated sugar
- ¼ tsp fine sea salt
- ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold and cut into ½-inch cubes
For the apple filling
- 3 medium apples (about 1 ½ lb), peeled, cored, and cut into ¼-inch slices
- 3 tbsp honey
- ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
- 1 tbsp tapioca starch
- 1 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
Instructions
- 1
Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Line a 9×9-inch baking pan with parchment paper, leaving a 2-inch overhang on two opposite sides to use as handles for lifting the bars out later.
- 2
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the rolled oats, rice flour, tapioca starch (the crust-and-crumble portion), granulated sugar, and fine sea salt until evenly combined. Add the cold butter cubes and work them in with a pastry cutter or your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse, clumpy crumbs with some pea-sized pieces of butter remaining — do not overwork it into a smooth dough.
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