Coconut Granola Bars
We are addicted to homemade granola bars in our house. I’m always experimenting and trying new recipes and adaptatations (although I think Mike would be happy with chewy granola bars every day for the next 15 years). That’s one of the great thing about granola bars…they’re really hard to ruin. I tend to start with a basic recipe and throw in whatever I have in the cupboard that I think would be good.
That’s pretty much what I did with this recipe. I started with a basic granola bar recipe I found on tasty kitchen and used whatever add-ins I had in the cupboard (chocolate chips, dried fruit, m&m’s, etc). I’ve also been wanting to experiment with coconut oil that I won from a blog contest, so I decided to replace the canola oil with coconut oil and turn these into coconut granola bars. At that point, it seemed to make sense to throw in some shredded coconut, and since Mike loves the taste of the peanut butter in the chewy granola bars, I added in some coconut peanut butter (won from the same blog contest) at the last minute. But don’t worry if you don’t have some of these ingredients. While I love the coconutty flavor of these, I bet they’d be just as good with canola oil, dried fruit, and regular peanut butter instead.
Coconut Granola Bars
Ingredients:
2 cups Rolled Oats
1 cup Whole Wheat Flour
1/2 cups Chocolate Chips
1/2 cup shredded coconut
1/4 cups Brown Sugar
1/2 cups Wheat Germ
1 teaspoon Cinnamon
½ teaspoons Salt
1 whole Egg Beaten
½ cups Honey
½ cups Coconut Oil
1/4-1/2 cup coconut peanut butter (I eyeballed it)
2 teaspoons Vanilla Extract
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9 x 13 baking pan with parchment paper and spray with cooking spray.
Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a small bowl, mix together the wet ingredients. Pour the wet mixture into the dry and mix well. Pat the mixture into the pan.
Bake for about 15 minutes for chewy granola bars (or a little longer for crunchy granola bars). Remove from the oven and let cool for a couple of minutes then slice into bars. Finish cooling completely before removing from the pan or they will break apart.
adapted from Buns In My Oven