Yummy oatbars recipe
Healthy snack recipe alert! I'm always looking for healthy recipes which are easy to make, so you can imagine my excitement when I got the cookbook of the Dutch book Voedselzandloper. The book deals with many recipes, from breakfast to dips, but I absolutely love the snack section. I made the healthy oatbars to try them out, and let me tell you: they are absolutely awesome!
What do you need?
The ingredients are simple, no foods you can't pronounce the name of, which is always a big plus for me:
- 150 g oats
- 50 g peanut butter
- 1 banana
- 1 egg
- 50 g hazelnuts
- 60 g dark chocolate (at least 75% cocoa)
- A bit of olive oil
Now that you got all these ingredients, of which most of them you probably already had lying around, we can go straight to the preparation part!
What do you do?
- First, you preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius.
- Now that the oven is heating up, you can start preparing your oatbars. Get your food processor out and mix the oats with the banana, the egg, the peanut butter, and a bit of olive oil to smoothen everything up. It should look like this after you've blended everything.
- Cut the hazelnuts into chunks and add them to the rest in your food processor.
- Take an oven dish and cover the bottom with baking paper.
- Put the contents in the food processor in the oven dish and spread it evenly. Press on it tightly so you really get an even spread. My result look liked this.
- Bake the bottom of your soon-to-be oatbars in the oven for about 30 minutes. Afterwards, let it cool for a bit.
- Finally we're getting to the chocolate part. Melt the chocolate au bain-marie: this means that you have to put the chocolate in a heat-proof bowl in a pan with boiling water. Officially, the heat-proof bowl shouldn't touch the water, but mine did so and I didn't really experience any consequences. Back to business - the chocolate will slowly melt in the heat-proof bowl. Let it cool for a tinie tiny bit now (seriously, really short or it will get solid again).
- Spread the melted chocolate on your oatbars. Now you can let the chocolate cool off for a long while.
- Cut everything up into 8 pieces, and voila, there you have your healthy, delicious oatbars!
Wait, what?... Chocolate and healthy? That's right, so keep reading...
That's right! Cocoa is good for your brains. It will keep your vessels healthy and will enhance the insuline sensitivity of your brains, which sounds fancy but basically means that your brain won't get old as fast as normal. Studies even showed that elderly with mild cognitive impairments have better results at cognitive tests when they have eaten cacao for 8 weeks. So you don't have to feel guilty eating those oatbars!
Of course, chocolate also contains sugar, that's why you should always look at the percentage of cacao in it and make sure it is as high as possible, at least 72-75%.
Source: Voedselzandloper Cookbook by Pauline Weuring
