Oat bars, or homemade granola breakfast cereal?
I started out wanting to make a low-carb sugar-free version of an accidential oatmeal coconut bar concoction I came up with earlier in the day at a church cookie bake-off for soldiers in Iraq. Those oatmeal coconut bars were supposed to be cookies, but melted down into a gooey mess that got scraped into a pan, and turned out to be a rather tasty, gooey, bar cookie.
But these ain't those.
My original intention was to use barley flour, but instead could only get oat flour. So, this recipie is one of those 'wheat free' things that should be pretty good for folks who are sensitive to wheat. Of course, I can't assure anybody that there isn't a bit of wheat in the processed ingredients, so if you have food sensitivities, look at the ingredients first.
- 2 sticks (equals 1 cup) butter, softened to room temp.
- 1 cup granulated Splenda
- 1 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
- 1/4 cup black strap molasses (or 1/3 cup if you want more)
- 2 cups rolled oats
- 1 cup oat flour
The coconut flakes I had were pretty huge flakes, I cut them down to be as fine as I wanted them to be. You do the same, chop that cup of coconut flakes down to be the consistency you want. I supppose if you want to do the same with the oatmeal, go for it, but that's a bit too uptight for me.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees f.
Cream the butter and Splenda in a mixing bowl. Don't do like I did and toss in all the Splenda at once, it'll just make a dusty cloud on you. Pour it in slowly as the butter is being whipped.
You can pretty much just start adding stuff in to the mixer. Be careful with the molasses, you don't wan't that stuff flying all over the room.
Get a typical 9x13 baking pan out. Something near that size will do. Grease the pan, use cooking spray, or whatever you do to lube a pan so the stuff doesn't stick. If you wat to believe your "no stick" pan won't stick, well, you go for it. Put the mixed up ingredients into the pan.
Bake for 25 minutes, or when it smell real good and you want to take it out.
Take the pan out of the oven and let it cool. But then, that's pretty obvious, ain't it?
I thought the stuff would cut apart like any other bar recipe, but it's going to have the consistency of, oh I don't know, damp sawdust. Bits of it will be clumped together, and the overall appearance will be like a granola.
I've eaten the stuff dry, and with milk as a cereal. It's great. It would also make a really great pie crust, or a bottom for some other pie or bar cookie recipe. I would like to figure out how to make this stuff into a bar cookie; I suspect taking that 1/4 cup of molassess and going up to a full cup would do the trick.
Oh, here is the nutritional low-down:
| carbs (g) | fiber (g) | calories | fat (g) | |
| 1 cup butter | 0 | 0 | 1628 | 184 |
| 1 cup granular Splenda | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 cup unsweetened coconut | 56 | 40 | 1488 | 128 |
| 1/4 cup black strap molasses | 50 | 0 | 193 | 0 |
| 2 cups oats | 206 | 17 | 1214 | 11 |
| 1 cup oat flour | 152 | 16 | 912 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 464 | 73 | 5435 | 323 |
As you can see, this recipe is neither low-fat nor low-carb. You can subtract the fiber from the carbs to get your 'true' carbs, if you wish, but then that's a disputed item. There are enough calories in here so that you could probably burn the stuff as fuel in your fireplace. Maybe the recipe could be modded a bit more to make it even more low-carb, I'll try with the barley flour later on.
