I’ve been messing around with an old recipe for oat crunchies, trying to come up with something a little less sweet and a little more chewy. By chance, I wandered into Holland and Barrett looking for wheatgerm (oddly enough, not stocked at normal UK supermarkets), and bought about a ton of dates on special. Which led to these lovely things:
Chewy date-oat bars
130 grams butter
2/3 cup brown sugar (anything from demerera to muscovado works for me)
15 ml honey
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 1/3 cups of rolled oats
about 2/3 cup flour
1 cup chopped dates
1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees, and lightly grease a small baking tin.
2. Melt the butter, sugar and honey together on low heat. When they’re melted and nicely mixed, stir in the bicarbonate of soda.
3. Mix in the rest of the ingredients.
4. Press it all firmly into the baking tin, and bake for about 20 minutes. When you take it out of the oven, leave it for 5-10 minutes before cutting into squares or bars, and leave for another 20 minutes or so before you try get these out the tray, as they will get firmer and stickier (as opposed to crumbly) as they stand.
WOW… I made these today for tomorrow’s early morning soccer spectator breakfast, I hope I still have some in the morning! I added 1/2 cup slivered almonds, and then topped with sliced almonds, whole oats and oat bran. I also exchanged half of the flour with whole wheat. I think that you could probably reduce the butter to 1/2 cup and it would be fine, but I have not tried that yet! Yum!
Betty