Recipe!
I thought I'd do a recipe today. Because... I wanted to. So nyer.
This is sort of my recipe, in that it's a combination of a few other recipes I vaguely remembered from books and TV, from which I evolved my own version. It's very, very easy, can be adapted to whatever flavour you like best, and is much nicer for breakfast than most of the bars you can buy in shops. They keep okay for a week or more in a decent container (I've got a biscuit tin for mine, but then I'm like that. An Anzac tin, in fact, for you Aussies).
Pepper's Breakfast Bars
Not suitable for coeliacs, because if you leave out the flour or use gluten-free stuff it all falls apart. But if you suffer from nut allergies, you can just leave out the peanut butter and nuts / seeds, and maybe add more fruit.
Butter 4oz / 100g / ½ cup / 1 stick
Self-raising flour 4oz / 100g / 1 cup
Porridge oats 4oz / 100g / 1 cup
Caster sugar 3 ½ oz / 75g / ¾ cup
Honey 1 tablespoon / 15ml
Maple syrup 1 tablespoon / 15ml
Peanut butter 1 tablespoon / 15ml
Nuts, seeds, berries, and dried fruit 4oz / 100g / 1 cup
For the nuts, seeds, berries and dried fruit: Use a combination to your taste, up to about 4oz / 100g / 1 cup total combined weight. 6oz / 150g / 1½ cups absolute maximum, I'd say. Any more and the bars won't hold together so well. You can use less, if you prefer them plain, but they're kinda boring. I tend to use a random mix of whatever I've got in the cupboard, but some of my favourites are:
Seeds:
- sesame seeds
- pumpkin seeds
- sunflower seeds
Nuts:
- pecans, chopped
- walnuts, chopped
- cashews, chopped
Berries, fruit:
- Sour cherries (those semi-dried ones, mmmm)
- Apricots, chopped
- Dried apples, chopped
- Sultanas
Baking tray with raised sides, 11" x 7"
1 - Preheat the oven to a medium setting (Gas Mark 4 on mine - that's 350F / 180C, apparently). Grease the baking tray.
2 - In a large bowl, mix the flour, porridge oats, and nuts, seeds, berries and fruit.
3 - Put the butter, sugar, honey, maple syrup, and peanut butter into a pan and stir on a medium heat until the butter has melted. Pour onto the flour/oat/nuts/berries mix, and stir until it's all soaked into the dry ingredients.
4 - Tip the mix into baking tray, level it out, and press it down with the back of a metal spoon. Bake for about 15 mins, until golden.
5 - Leave it in the tray for five to ten minutes, then cut into bars and transfer to a cooling rack. They'll get less crumbly as they cool, so don't worry if they seem to be falling apart at first.
Today I is eating apple and maple flavour bars. Well, apple, maple, honey, sour cherry, sultana, sesame seed, sunflower seed, pumpkin seed, walnut, cashew, peanut, and macadamia nut bars, to be exact. I had some odds and ends to use up.
For 'Mericans and other people who don't use lbs and kg... I took the conversions from a brief google of websites, and the difference between measuring by weight and by volume is confusing, to say the least. And the stick of butter thing - what's that about, for god's sake? ;) Anyhow, I think they're about right.
This recipe isn't very precise anyhow. I tend to try variations like replacing some or all of the sugar with more honey and/or maple syrup (1 tbsp of honey or maple syrup is about half an oz / 25g in weight), replacing the flour with wheatgerm (you end up with breakfast cereal crumble - nice, but essentially useless for taking to work), and so on. Also, I don't usually like peanut butter, but I think it's quite nice in this - but you don't have to use it. If you do leave it out, don't replace it with anything - no additional sugar or butter. That's my experience, anyhow.
Oh, if you do want to replace all the sugar with honey / maple syrup, I'd suggest using more honey than maple syrup, because the maple syrup doesn't hold it together too well.