Healthy fruit and oat bar

Ingredients:

50g wholemeal flour

50g oatmeal

50g each chopped dates, prunes and sultanas

50g broken cashew nuts

40g sesame and sunflower seeds

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 heaped teaspoon mixed spice

75ml apple juice

Method:

1. Put the frying pan on low

2. Mix the spice in with the dry ingredients

3. Add the liquid and mix into a dough

4. Knead a few times to ensure the ingredients are mixed properly

5. Form into round and roll out into a circle as big as your frying pan – mine is about 22-25cm

6. Place in frying pan and turn the heat onto moderately low. Put lid on frying pan. (Or cover with a baking tray.)

7. Set timer for 8 minutes.

8. Turn over very carefully – it can be a bit fragile at this stage – and set timer for another 8 minutes.

9. Turn heat down to low and leave for another 7 minutes with lid off. Repeat with the other side.

10. Place on cooling tray for several minutes, then trim the edges and cut it into 6 bars, roughly 50g each, measuring roughly 10cm by 4.

Notes:

They should be very crisp on the outside, slightly soft in the middle and hold their shape well.

The calorie count for the flour and oats – total 328 – is around 50.

I haven’t bothered to count the calories for the rest of the ingredients because they count towards your 5-a-day.

They contain:

No added fat

No refined sugar

No yeast

You can play around with this recipe as much as you want. Provided you keep to 100g of flour and around 75ml of liquid.

I think these are great for a mid-morning snack. The only problem I can see is restricting yourself to only 1 bar at a time!


I first made these a couple of years ago, and started a thread about them on the BBC Food message boards. Quite a few people came back and said how much they'd enjoyed them - check out the variations in msg Nr 12.