As a biker and someone who often has to eat on the run, I love healthy handheld foods like granola bars. They fit nicely into my bike pack, they’re easy to eat, and they give me energy when I need a boost, whether I’m tackling a steep hill or a long afternoon filled with errands.
Unfortunately, a lot of store-bought granola bars are loaded with too much sugar (including corn syrup), wheat (which I don’t eat), and raisins. Raisins are okay, but for some reason, I don’t like them, or other dried bits of fruit, in my granola bars. Moreover, for what’s in these little bars, they’re darned expensive. So I decided to make my own this summer.
I started with a recipe from Emily Franklin’s Too Many Cooks: Kitchen Adventures with 1 Mom, 4 Kids, and 102 Recipes and made a few modifications to suit my tastes. Here’s my version, with lots of chocolate flavor, no wheat, and a palatable price tag.
Chocolate Flax Granola Bars
Yield: 8 bars
The beauty of a recipe like this is that it begs for experimentation. Substitute hemp cereal for the flax cereal, or if you don’t like chocolate, use plain puffed rice and skip the chips. Don’t like pumpkin seeds? Add crushed hazelnuts or toasted almonds. And of course, raisins will work too.
3 1/2 tbsp. almond butter
3 tbsp. honey
3 1/2 tbsp. brown rice syrup
1 tbsp. brown sugar
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups chocolate flavored puffed rice (I use EnviroKidz Organic Koala Crisp cereal)
1/2 cup flax cereal (I use Perky’s Nutty Flax cereal)
1 1/2 cup old fashioned rolled oats (not the instant kind!)
1/2 cup salted, roasted pumpkin seeds
1/4 cup miniature chocolate chips
Dash of ground cinnamon (optional)
Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Line an 8″ x 8″ baking pan with foil or a large sheet of parchment paper, leaving the ends hanging over one side so the bars can be lifted out of the pan after baking.
In a small saucepan, stir almond butter, honey, brown rice syrup, and brown sugar together over medium heat. When the sugar has melted and everything looks syrupy, take the pan off the heat and stir in the vanilla extract. Set pan aside.
In a large bowl, stir together the puffed rice, flax cereal, oats, pumpkin seeds, chocolate chips and cinnamon, if using. Scrape the syrup mixture over the cereals and mix until all the grains are thoroughly coated and sticky with the syrup. Dump the mixture into the prepared baking pan.
Now wet your hands with cool water and press the mixture down into the pan evenly. When the cereal starts sticking to your fingers, wet your hands down again.
Bake for 22-25 minutes, checking at 20 minutes. Remove the bars from the pan by picking up the long ends of the foil or parchment paper, and let the bars cool on a baking rack. When totally cool, cut the bars into eight triangular bars. Wrap each bar in plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator. Enjoy!
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I’m always looking for healthy homemade bars to send with my husband to work (he skis for work and burns a butt load of calories that need replenishing), these sound they’ll fit the bill perfectly!