More-ish Oaty Bites that take 5 minutes

While not completely devoid of sugar, there’s a lot less sugar in these oaty bites than your usual cake or breakfast bar.

They do contain natural sugars from the apple juice, dried fruit and maple syrup, but also see the reduced sugar options if your child is prone to energetic blood sugar highs!

There are plenty of options for your child to experiment with what they’d like to add – different seeds, nuts and nut butters, mashed banana, dessicated coconut, chocolate chips. You can make all sorts of tasty variants.

Yummy Ingredients

(Vegan, Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Egg Free, Nut and Coconut Free)

• 200g oats (rolled oats seem to stick best but any oats will do)
• 300 ml apple juice (use non-concentrated is you want less sugar)
• 50g of cranberries
• 50g raisins
• 50g of pumpkin seeds (you can soak these for a few hours or overnight to release more nutrients and help with digestion)
• 1 tbsp cinnamon
• 2-3 apples, chopped with skin
• 0 to 6 tbsp of maple syrup/ honey/ date syrup (depending on the sweet tooth of your family!)

We don’t actually add sugar to ours now – the apple juice and dried fruit seem to be enough, but I do find that if I start with more sugar (or salt) in a recipe, then my kids are more likely to gives it the thumbs up! Then I can reduce over time.

I double up this recipe and freeze a load, then defrost and warm them up when I need them.

Easy-Peasy Instructions

Unlike traditional British oaty flapjacks, there’s no heating of butter in the pan. Just one mixing bowl needed.

If you leave out the chopped apple, you can prepare everything in under five minutes (hey, and maybe you’re a super chef you can chop up apple quicker than me!). I put the kitchen timer on just to keep me on track.

When you do this recipe with your kids, naturally you’ll want a lot more time for gathering ingredients, kitchen resources, measuring, mixing, extra clearing up etc!

1. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C (or 320 degrees Farenheit).
2. Pop the oats into a large mixing bowl. It works best if they go in before the apple juice.
3. Then add everything else on the ingredient list in any order you like!
4. Mix it all up and when all the apple juice has been absorbed evenly, pop the mixture into a baking dish. I like to use a silicon sheet in mine to make washing up easier.

6. Leave to cool, then use a spatula to cut them into suitable size bars or squares (you can do that while they’re still in the pan..

Note: these don’t brown like normal oaty flapjacks, so I like to sprinkle milled seeds on top to give them colour (e.g. milled flaxseeds), as well as adding extra protein and good fat.

This is what they look like before the milled seeds go on.

Experimenting

Here’s just a few ideas for the sorts of ingredients you can choose to mix it up:

• Dried apricot, dates, figs (pre-chopped can save time)
• Fresh blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, mango (or even frozen blueberries)
• Orange rind or orange juice
• Chocolate chips
• Dessicated coconut and coconut oil
• Peanuts, pecans, chopped roast hazelnuts (just be mindful of whole nuts as a choking hazard if your child is under 5)
• Fresh or dried ginger, cardamom

The world’s your oaty oyster.

Milk-based version

You can replace some – or all – of the apple juice with milk (coconut milk from carton or can/ dairy/ nut/ oat etc) and then add a few tablespoons of melted coconut oil. A couple of mashed bananas can help with the making it more sticky.

I find with the milk-based bars it helps to sub in half of the oats for dessicated coconut for extra sweetness. Essentially these are like porridge in a bar.

They’ll be a bit more crumbly than the apple juice mix, but still tasty.

Think of that yummy baked apple and cinnamon smell…)

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