Make Your Own Granola Bars

Ingredients

To make these, we’ll need oats, cinnamon, baking soda, honey, sucanat, butter, egg, flax seed, flour, and raisins. Now, this recipe is very versatile. If you don’t like cinnamon, leave it out or substitute a different spice. If you can’t stand the thought of raisins because you used to shove them up your nose when you were a kid, then leave them out. Let your mind run wild! Create a daily flavor, like Ben and Jerry’s ice cream! Chocolate chip and chopped nuts make an excellent granola bar. You could add any type of dried fruit that you want. The bowl is your canvas! Go nuts, add nuts!

Mix the butter and sugar

Dig out your mixer. Realize that you didn’t clean it the last time you used it, so there is fossilized butter specs and cocoa powder residue all over it. Gosh, how could you do something like that? Clean it off and then put your butter and sucanat in a big bowl. Beat it with the now clean mixer until it’s crumbly, about two minutes.

Add egg

Now, add the egg and beat it again. Egg, butter, and sugar…..I think this recipe is really going somewhere!

Honey and flax

You can put your mixer away now. Add the ground flax seed and honey. I know you can’t see the honey in the picture, but it sank to the bottom. It’s a good learning experiment! Honey weighs more than butter, sucanat, and egg mixed. Bet you didn’t learn THAT in school. Stir it up.

Dry ingredients

Now you can add your flour, oats, cinnamon, and baking soda. Stir it together just until it’s combined. Man, it smells delicious! My tummy is growling. Now is a good time to eat one of the store bought granola bars since you can’t eat raw egg…..who made that dumb rule anyway?

Yum, raisins!

Add the raisins at the very end and just stir until they get incorporated really well. You could substitute Craisins, but mine were in the basement and I didn’t feel like going to get them. I pooped myself out cleaning the mixer. I love raisins though…..I wasn’t weird like my husband, so I didn’t stick things up my nose.

Pat into your pan

Grease an 11×7 inch dish with butter. Dump your granola mixture in the dish and press it evenly.

Bake until golden brown

Now, bake the granola bars until they’re golden brown around the edges and set in the middle. Your house smells like Christmas! Cinnamon makes me think of Christmas……it’s Christmas every day in our house.  It’s time to brew a pot of coffee and eat your granola bar. They keep very well at room temperature in an airtight container. You probably don’t need to know that though because they won’t last long enough for it to be a problem.

Don’t you feel much closer to the earth now? Go hug a tree!