Thawing and draining the raspberries is important for getting the bars to firm up. When thawing the raspberries in the colander, you can gently squeeze them with your hands or press lightly with a spoon to get more liquid out. They will probably still be a little wet and mushy, which is fine. You just don’t want to have tons of excess water seeping out.

If you’d rather not mess with thawing, you can also use fresh raspberries! However, this is usually more expensive because it requires A LOT of fresh raspberries. And I found my fresh raspberry version to be very, very juicy. Like, kind of hard to eat.

I highly recommend the chill time! It helps them set up into bars that hold their shape really well. Also because I am weirdly obsessed with cold dessert bars and I think they taste so good.

Also, nothing against raspberries, but I’m inclined to believe that you could kinda put anything in between two layers of that crumbly cookie-like crust and be very happy with yourself.

I recommend using old fashioned rolled oats, not quick oats.