Thursday, May 5, 2011

Oatmeal Everything Bars

These are supposed to be oatmeal cranberry bars, but naturally I did not realize until I had started throwing together all my ingredients that we did not have enough dried cranberries for this recipe. Fortunately, we had a bag of "mixed dried fruit" pieces which worked just as well. There were different types of raisins, dates, mango etc and I thought it made these bars a lot more exciting than just cranberries. Oh, and since I love walnuts so much I through some of those in as well... The more the merrier right?

Sometimes I find myself wanted a good snack but I try to stay away from cookies as much as possible. The only thing to do in this case is make your own snack bars or granola bars. This recipe is almost cookie like in flavor as well as texture. These are fairly sweet thanks to the coconut and brown sugar, but a lot more crumbly than a store bought granola bar. There is really nothing sticky holding it all together, just a little bit of butter and an egg. I might suggest cooking it for a shorter time so that it does not dry out the bars so much. Other than being a pain to cut and move I have nothing bad to say about these! With the brown sugar, flour, butter etc, they aren't much healthier than cookies but you can pretend ;)

This is apparently going to be a short, lazy post but look for more granola bar recipes to come! After all, there are only so many different kinds of cookies I can bake this summer.