When at an all-time sugar low, these tiny energy bites of cereal bars are the best way to enjoy ourselves, guilt-free! They’re tasty, very sweet, nutritious, healthy and best of all, they’ll give you a long-lasting feeling of a full stomach!
These energy bites can easily fit in your handbag, your gym bag or your school backpack.
The need for them first came up when I had to load up on snacks for Alexandra, mainly after her swimming lessons or at the playground. The good thing about those bars is that they feel like eating chocolate and they keep you full for quite a while because of the cereal and the nuts they contain. It’s also very easy to modify the ingredients, depending on what we like or what we have available at home when making the bites. Get your kids on board too – they’ll have fun making them as well as tasting them!
INGREDIENTS
Basic Mix
- 200g of couverture or dark chocolate
- 1 tbsp of butter or 2 tbsp of olive oil
- 40g of almonds
- 80g of oat flakes
- 2 tbsp of peanut butter or tahini
For the variations
- 40g of raisins and cranberries
- 2 tbsp of grated coconut
- 30g of dried fruit cut up in pieces (papaya, melon, citrus, plum, apricot), you’ll find plenty in stores selling nuts
- Orange and lemon zest
INSTRUCTIONS
We start by making one basic mix, which we will then divide in two in order to make two different varieties of snacks. That can be done pretty easily and it gives us a tasty alternative.
We place one small pan over medium high heat and add the chocolate in pieces, then add the olive oil or the butter and stir until the chocolate has completely melted. Be careful with the heat as we don’t want to burn up the mix and ruin the chocolate.
We add in the peanut butter and stir until the mix is smooth. We take the pan off the heat.
We drop in the almond and oat flakes and stir well.
We divide the mix in two separate bowls.
In the first one, we add the raisins, cranberries and dried pieces of fruit. We add the zest from half an orange and stir well. Our mix must be thick enough to be kneaded to tiny rolls but not too thick; it will become even more dense once it’s cooled off.
After dipping our fingers in a bit of olive oil, we knead small rolls and rub them over cocoa.
In the second mix, we add the grated coconut and lemon zest. We stir well. We knead small rolls and rub them over grated coconut.
We place the rolls in a bowl or metal box. For a couple of days we can leave them out of the fridge, but for a longer amount of time it’s better to preserve them refrigerated. They might get pretty dense in the fridge, but if we take them out a few minutes before eating them, they’ll be just fine.
This recipe is not strict at all, on the contrary it allows for many change-ups in the ingredients. We can use walnuts, cashews or hazelnuts instead of almonds, or replace cranberries with goji, dried blueberry or anything else we like. In nut stores we can also find pre-made mixes of nuts and cereal, which we can definitely use. We may also use coconut oil instead of butter, and thus make bars suitable for Lent or a vegan diet. If you’re bored of washing dishes and pans, you can place some membrane over a small pyrex pan and spread the mix, put it in the fridge for a few hours and then cut it into bars. In general, you can try and discover what you like best, it’s great to make this snack by yourself.
The initial idea came out of here
