Making Homemade Granola Bars | Easy Kid-Friendly Snack

Granola bars are such a healthy snack, especially when you're on the go in the mornings. But many of the packaged ones contain added sugar, unnecessary calories, and artificial ingredients. Today, I want to share with you a homemade, healthier granola bar. First, I'm Yumna, aka Feel Good Foodie. I share wholesome, nutritious recipes that make your body feel good. And this granola bar recipe is definitely one you'll feel good about having and giving your kids. It's made with dates, nuts, oats, and other ingredients you can definitely pronounce. It's easy for meal prepping, perfect for lunch boxes, and lasts weeks in the fridge. Everyone loves these. So here's what you'll need. You'll need oats, dates, coconut oil, maple syrup, flax seeds, chopped dried apples, almonds, vanilla extract, and cinnamon. We're gonna start by making the date paste. It's simply chopped, pitted dates along with some warm water. You can also use date paste if you can find it in the store. It can be a little hard to find, though. We're gonna give it a whirl. You can stop the food processor and scrape the walls just a little bit to make sure everything is well blended. And this is the consistency you're looking for. And now we're gonna transfer this to a saucepan to make a caramel sauce. And to that, we're adding four tablespoons of coconut oil, one tablespoon of maple syrup, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and a fourth of a teaspoon of cinnamon. Now we just wanna cook all this together until the coconut oil melts and the date paste becomes darker. It should take about five to seven minutes. All right, while we're letting that simmer, we're gonna go ahead and prepare some of the other toppings for the granola bars. We'll take a nice little quarter sheet pan and we'll add to it some oats, some chopped almonds, and whole flax seeds. Give it a good shake. And we're gonna toast these in the oven at 350 for just 10 to 15 minutes, just until they get a little bit golden and nice and toasted. All right, the oats mixture is nice and toasted. The date mixture over here has gotten nice and dark. And we also have some dried apples that have just been chopped up like this. So now we're just gonna mix everything together. Chopped apples, we'll add this right on top. And now just give everything a mix until it's nice and combined. And when you're stirring, you wanna make sure that every single thing is very well coated by the date paste that way it gets nice and sticky. All right, now we'll transfer this to an eight-by-eight pan and just drop it in here and make everything nice and smooth and flat. If you wanted to have thinner granola bars, you can also use a nine-by-nine pan, but I love the way it looks with an eight-by-eight. And now we just smooth it out. Okay, and the key to getting these granola bars not to crumble at all is to really pack it in there. So you can be done at this point, but I highly recommend pushing it even more in there and trying to really pack it into the pan. So I like to use a parchment paper and just push down on it. You can even use something like a cup to help smoothen it out because we want these granola bars to look legit, you guys. We want them to look like they're store-bought. And this is what's really gonna help do that. When it looks like this, you know you've done a good job. And now what you wanna do is just cover it and store it in the fridge for two hours until it's chilled, and then you can cut it up. All right, these have been sitting in the fridge for two hours, so it's time to slice them up. And what we did here was we greased the baking pan and we also used parchment paper because it makes it super simple to just lift these up like that. So you can slice these into squares or bars. What I like to do is make them into 12 equal bars so they look like legit granola bars. And if you'd like, you can wipe the knife between each slice just to make sure that each slice is nice and neat. And look how good these look. They are so delicious, full of ingredients you can actually pronounce, and they pretty much stay well together just like a granola bar would. So let's give it a taste test. Tastes just like fall, so flavorful, so delicious. I think it's also time for Video Matt to try one of these. All right, Video Matt. Let's give you one of these granola bars. Here you go. Awesome. He likes it. And I hope you guys try the recipe and like it as well. Thank you so much for watching. Check out the video description below for a full written recipe. And be sure to like, follow, subscribe for more healthy-ish recipes with feel-good ingredients. See you guys next time.