Making Breakfast Bars

 I started making these regularly after I moved. At work there is an early morning meeting once a week and to get there on time I would skip breakfast eating two of these on the train instead. It gave me plenty of opportunities to improve the recipe. Now I could easily buy some bars instead but they are all 1 too expensive to be a regular purchase and 2 mostly sugar. 

Ingredients

3 dl Oats

50g Coconut oil
100g Datepaste or dates

1 Banana

100g Peanut butter

50g Almonds or other nuts

50g Dried fruit(I like cranberrys)

Instructions

In general you can mix these however you want but this is how I usually do. Preheat the oven to 175 C.

Melt the coconut oil in a double boiler (basically put it in a small bowl and then put the bowl in warm water). Personally I used my small mixing bowl and put the water in my large mixing bowl to avoid unnecessary clean up. While the coconut oil is melting use a blender to turn the oats into flour. I use a immersion blender and a mason jar. This doesn't have to be perfect since some texture is nice.

Peel the banana and put it in the mixing bowl with the oil along with the date past, and mush them with a fork. A thing a bout date paste, I prefer to use it but it can be somewhat hard to find in stores. You can replace it with finely chopped or blended dates.  

Then add the peanut butter, oat flour and stir. Roughly chop the almonds and cranberrys add those as well and stir it into a even paste. If its too dry you can add up to 50g of juice. 

Spread the mixture on a parchment paper on a baking tray making it about 0,5 to 1 cm thick. I tried to make it a square since it needs to be cut up later. Then bake for 20 minutes.

Once it's baked take it out of the oven and let it cool for a little. But before it cools completely and gets hard cut it up in 2×5 cm pieces.

Results

I have done this several times before and it turned out like usual so it's hard to have any opinions since its mostly what I was expecting. In general they are good and I lake them. If you are used to the store bought kind they are less sweet and they have a milder and less immediate taste. This is mostly because there isn't as much sugar. But most store bought bars are more like candy than food.  

There is a thing with the amount. I could have made a double batch and it would have filled out the baking tray rather than just a bit in the middle. But I like to save these for the days when I don't have time to eat breakfast therefor these will last me a long time a there is a limit to how much I want to store. 

About storing I put them in a box in the freezer, I don't think they would survive that long. But they thaw very fast in a few minutes you can eat them.