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Great Granola Bar Challenge - Recipe 1

Published 21 May, 2009

I'm starting a quest to make the ultimate granola bar - with the challenging caveats that it must be gluten free, dairy free, soya free, egg free AND should be robust enough to handle a bouncy day in a kid's rucksack.

I know, not so easy.

It's easy enough to go and buy a nut bar, but I find they're too hard and too big-nutty for the kids. Plus, I'd like to be able to put in what I want - less sugar and more nuts!

Today, the little 'uns and I made a start. Taking our lead from this peanut butter granola bar recipe , 4 year old Edie started by greasing the baking tins (we should have done as we were told and used baking parchment), and 1 1/2 yr old Alex poured water from the sink onto the floor and into the drawer full of flours. Excellent start I thought.

Here's the granola bar recipe we cobbled together from the guidelines above.

Our very first gluten free granola bar recipe

Preheat the oven to 170C / 350F. Line an 8*10 inch baking tray with baking parchment, or as we did, two smaller trays.

Gluten free granola glue 1/4 cup agave syrup
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup brown sugar
Knob coconut oil (solid) (optional - just going for a better 'set')
1/2 cup peanut butter (crunchy)
1 tsp vanilla

Grunchy gluten free granola base 1 cup buckwheat flakes
1/2 cup ground almonds
1/2 cup shredded coconut

Crunchy nutty mix Roughly equal amounts, making up 1.5 cups of:
Crushed toasted hazlenuts
Chopped pecans
Pine nuts
Sunflower seeds

Dried fruit combo Basically what we had in the cupboard:
1 cup of roughly equal amounts of sultanas, cranberries and chopped dried apricots

Making your granola mix Heat the syrup and sugar in a pan until boiling family and add the vanilla and coconut oil if using. Then stir in the peanut butter and stir until melted and mixed completely.

Then stir in your granola base (flakes and stuff) - keep stirring longer that you think you need to. Then add the nuts and fruit and stir in too.

Put the mix into your tin and get something flat to press down hard with - I used a tupperware box as close to the size of the baking tray as I could get so I could really press hard.

Bake for 20 mins at 350F 170C - you want to avoid burning which is the main danger and will quickly render your precious granola bars bitter and inedible.

When they're done, remove from the oven and let cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then put onto a wire cooking tray. When completely cool, you can cut them into bars, pop them in an airtight box and hide them from everyone. Apart from the kids, of course. No really.

So that's our first attempt at lunchbox friendly gluten free granola bars, with no other allergens allowed (nuts excepted).

Verdict: Tasty, and the kids loved them - possible because they are quite soft, but they came out a bit crumbly. Fine for a delicate afternoon cup of tea at home, but shrapnel after 5 seconds in a grasping toddler's sticky mitt.

Do you know a great gluten free granola bar recipe (and everything else-free!) you could point me at? Or have any tips on how to make the above recipe more crunchy and less crumbly?

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