Make your own organic energy bars
Energy Bars (BikeRadar)
Granola bars are a great blend of fruit and nuts held together in a tasty, chewy package that will travel well in your day bag or jersey pocket. The great thing with these home-made energy bars is that you can use fruit spreads as part of the paste to bind everything together, giving it more taste and more natural sugars too.
1. Preheat your oven to 190°C. Now line a 20cm round (or square) baking tin with greaseproof baking paper and thinly grease the inside of it.
2. In a large saucepan melt the butter, honey, fruit spread and sugar together on a medium heat, stirring until dissolved. Now bring it to the boil and cook for two minutes so that the sugar caramelises, making it a sticky sauce.
3. Add the oats and mix well then add all of the other fruits, nuts and seeds. Give this a good mix before pouring into the cake tin, patting down with the back of a metal spoon. Then place in the middle of the oven.
4. Cook for 15-20 minutes until set. If it starts to burn cover with foil. Once ready just turn it out and leave to cool on a rack, then slice into wedges to suit your appetite.
Chefs tips
This is a sweet snack thanks to the honey and fruit paste, but most of the sugars are slower burning fruit sugars so you shouldn't get a big rush/crash from these bars. Oats contain lots of soluble fibre that helps to regulate sugar release so this balances well with the sweetness.
This recipe does contain a lot of different ingredients so try shopping in a health food store that sells by weight so you can just get what you need. Alternatively, if you don't want to buy all that, just pick your favourites and add more of them, or swap the fruit paste for more honey, the walnuts for pecans and so on. As long as you get a thick, firm mixture to push into the cake tin you should find it's still super tasty.
Ingredients
- 80g butter
- 80g honey
- 40g pear and apricot or prune spread
- 80g dark brown sugar
- 120g jumbo oats
- 30g walnut pieces
- 30g sultanas
Related articles
- 30g organic dried apricots
- 30g pumpkin seeds
- 30g sunflower seeds
- 30g linseeds
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User Comments
There are 6 comments on this post
Showing 1 - 6 of 6 comments
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mountaincarrot
Posted Sat 17 Nov, 9:12 pm GMT Flag as inappropriate
Well maybe, but if you want to eat healthily, then the last thing you should be doing is destroying those delicate fatty acids in your walnuts, pumpkin and especially the linseed at 190 Centigrade.
Eat them raw or damage the oils and make them bad for you. There is tons of research on the subject. Try "Fats that heal, fats that kill" Udo Erasmus.
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cyclistbruce
Posted Sun 29 Mar, 8:32 pm BST Flag as inappropriate
These are fantastic! I used half the amount and cooked them in a cup cake tin, so just the right size. Only negative, you end up farting like a trooper!
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profound_d
Posted Wed 1 Apr, 5:35 pm BST Flag as inappropriate
Very nice but so much butter?
I just made the same recipe but cut the butter down to 20g from 80g and added a bit of lemon juice to counter the large amounts of sugar.
They taste just as good as the version with 80g of butter in.
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profound_d
Posted Mon 6 Apr, 4:25 pm BST Flag as inappropriate
Very nice but so much butter?
I just made the same recipe but cut the butter down to 20g from 80g and added a bit of lemon juice to counter the large amounts of sugar.
They taste just as good as the version with 80g of butter in.
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profound_d
Posted Mon 6 Apr, 4:27 pm BST Flag as inappropriate
Also just found that you can make them with only 20g of butter and not put them in the oven so not destroying all the fatty acids as mentioned by mountaincarrot above.
Just make the caramel as described, then mix in the oats and other stuff and put into your cake tin and just leave on a rack to cool for a few hours - recommend using a silicone cake case to avoid the mix sticking to it.
Mine worked perfectly.
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scottishfiction
Posted Thu 16 Jun, 10:56 am BST Flag as inappropriate
I followed profound's advice re: not using the oven and I also used dried mango/pineapple instead of apricot, and added some peanut butter to the caramel mix. They taste great.
A tip for getting the mix flat in the tray is to cut a piece of greaseproof paper twice the size of your tray. Lay the paper on the tray and spoon out your mixture. Once you've patted it down with a spoon, fold over the excess paper and uses a rolling pin / tall glass to flatten and compress the mixture. You can also pull over each edge of the paper in turn to square up the edges.
