Success! Breakfast Bars...

I have met with success in the adaptation of a breakfast bar recipe! I'm very excited that we now have a total of 3 breakfast options: polenta, grits & these fantastic breakfast bars!

The original recipe can be found here:

http://www.elanaspantry.com/breakfast-bars/

That recipe calls for vanilla extract & shredded coconut, though, and we are supposed to be avoiding coconut, vanilla and alcohol (which is the base for most extracts). So I decided that candied lemon and orange peel would work in place of both of them. Coconut is kind of sticky, and the citrus peel would add that little extra depth of flavor intended by the vanilla.

And then I realized that I had whole almonds, but no almond flour. I did have white rice flour, though. So I decided that grinding the almonds as finely as my food processor would allow and replacing a small amount with rice flour should probably do the trick.

I had no grapeseed oil, but vegetable oil is fairly flavorless, so that should work.

I also discovered that there were no sunflower seeds in the house. Oh well, I could just increase the pumpkin seeds to cover it.

I'm not a big fan of raisins. If there are any in my cabinets somewhere, they really need to go out to compost, because I don't remember buying them, which means they must have made the move with us. That means they are seriously old! But a mix of dried cherries and blueberries could cover that.

I finally started making the breakfast bars. I ground up all of the almonds, mixed the dry ingredients, and gathered the mix-ins... only to discover that I had not saved any of the almonds for the 'slivered almonds' portion of the recipe. Well, I decided to replace the slivered almonds with coarsely ground hazelnuts.

So out of the original 10 ingredients, I at least tweaked 6 of them.

This is what I finally ended up doing:

Dry ingredients:

1 c ground almonds

1/4 c white rice flour

1/4 tsp baking soda

Wet ingredients:

1/4 c vegetable oil

1/4 c agave nectar

Mix-ins (amounts are seriously estimated):

1/4 c candied orange peel, diced

1/4 c candied lemon peel

1/4 c dried blueberries

1/4 c dried tart cherries

3/4 c raw pumpkin seeds

1/4 c coarsely ground raw hazelnuts

Mix dry ingredients together. In another bowl, mix wet ingredients together.

Grease an 8x8 inch baking pan.

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Gather mix-ins.

Working fairly quickly, add wet ingredients to dry and mix well. Add the mix-ins.

Scrape dough into pan and, using damp hands, press the dough to cover the bottom of the pan.

Bake for 17 minutes. Cool, slice and serve.

The results were quite tasty but a bit well done around the edges, and the pieces were kind of flat. I'm thinking that next time I will make a double batch in the same size pan and bake it a little longer. But yeah, all in all, a resounding success!