Little Tin Bird

This weekend has been All About Baking, the fruits of which is the rather deeeelicious Granola Bar. This is a chewy, sweet, tasty, moist, fruity, seedy, nutty square of pure awesome. Would you like to know how to make it? Ok! Here goes. This is a recipe my mum has been making for a few years mainly to eat after (marathon canoeing) races and also as a quick breakfast bar.

You will need:

• 6 oz of butter
• 5 oz clear honey
• 9 oz demerara sugar
• 12 oz porridge oats
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 3 oz raisins
• 3 oz glace cherries (chopped)
• 3 oz dried apricots (chopped)
• 3 oz pumpkin seeds
• 2 oz ground almonds
• 2 oz sesame seeds
• 3 oz pecan nuts (roughly chopped)

It takes a little while to chop all of the bits that need chopping, so I would make sure that you chop them and then assemble all of your dried ingredients before you start melting the honey and the butter.

Right, now that you have your dried ingredients ready (pretty picture optional) you’ll need to preheat your oven to 190 degrees C and line a roasting tin (12.5 x 9.5 inches is the size we use, you could use different sized tins but you’d need to alter the cooking time accordingly) with baking parchment. Trust me, this is entirely necessary and you NEED to line it with this paper!

A word of advice with measuring out the honey, which is raaaather tricky: pop your saucepan on the scales and set it to zero and then weigh the honey straight into the pan. voila, accurate weighing and minimal stickiness.

Add the butter to the honey, and melt on a low/medium heat.

When the honey and butter have melted, add the sugar and stir until dissolved. Boil this for 1-2 minutes (whilst stirring) until the sauce is thickened.

Take the pan off the heat and then mix the dry ingredients into the caramel sauce. This is the part where you will be glad that you put all the ingredients in one bowl in the first place ;-)

When you have mixed the caramel thoroughly into the mixture, pour it all into the lined tin and press down.

Bake it for approximately 15 minutes or so until it is beginning to brown. You don’t want it to be too brown because it sets well as it cools.

You will need to leave it in the tin until it is completely cold before you take it out and cut it into pieces. Store in a tin, or enjoy straight away!

It is very, very nice. Also it is very filling!

The good thing about this recipe is that you can substitute parts of it if you don’t have the right ingredients. For example, the first batch of this that I made I only had half of the demerara sugar, so I just topped it up with normal caster sugar. I couldn’t find any pecan nuts, so I used walnuts and brazil nuts. You could use different dried fruits, if you don’t like apricots. I like to use some crystallized ginger in here too but not everyone does so I don’t do that very often.

So there you have it … yummy homemade Granola Bar. I hope you enjoy it, have fun :-) xxxxx