Oaty fruity cake bars: healthy and delicious cereal bars

Who says cereal bars are unhealthy? In my continuing search for healthy, but delicious sweet snacks I came up with these oaty fruity cake bars. They’re low GI, very healthy and great for making with children, especially if you have two children, as one can do the wet mixture and one can do the dry mixture. They are really delicious – lovely and moist and are a little reminiscent of bread and butter pudding. They use mayonnaise, rather than eggs and oil, which I’ve been trying out a bit in muffin recipes and thought I’d give a go here. It makes them a bit lower fat, but doesn’t make them fat free. It can be gluten-free, if you use gluten-free oats and gluten-free baking powder.

Ingredients

You will need two mixing bowls – one for the dry ingredients and one for the wet ingredients. If you’re baking with two children, let them be in charge of one bowl each.

Wet ingredients

3 bananas (really, really overripe, if possible)
2 heaped tbsp mayonnaise (we used Tesco’s own-brand mayonnaise, but I’m sure most types would work)
¼ cup light agave syrup
¼ cup dark agave syrup
2 apples, peeled, cored and grated

Dry ingredients

3 cups oats
1 cup buckwheat muesli (or trail mix or just a mix of dried fruits, cereal and seeds)
1 cup sultanas or raisins
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder

Method

Mush up the bananas really well and then mix in the rest of the wet ingredients.
Mix all the dry ingredients together, using a big wooden spoon.
Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients.
Pour in the wet ingredients.
Mix together really well.
Line a large roasting tin with baking parchment and grease if necessary (we use a silicone-based parchment which doesn’t require greasing).
Pour mixture in and spread out until flattened down.
Bake at 180°C for 18 minutes, or until going brown on top.
Cool for 5 minutes.
Cut into bars or squares (or whatever shapes you want) and cool for another 5 minutes.
Remove from tin and cool on a rack for 10 minutes.
Eat. And see how quickly they disappear!

Adaptations

I’d like to try the recipe with just eggs and no fat and see if that works, as then they would be super healthy, then. I’d also like to try them with vegan mayonnaise, to see if that works as well. You could swap one cup of oats for another cup of buckwheat muesli or trail mix. You could use mixed dried fruit, rather than just sultanas.

I hope you enjoying making these Oaty fruity cake bars – do come back and let me know how they came out, if you do.

Ten Vegetarian Main Meals by Tasha Goddard

In case you haven’t noticed the links in the sidebar, I’ve published a little recipe eBook. It’s available in multiple formats, though my preferred one is the PDF version, because it’s much prettier, and recipe books should be pretty, really!

Ten Vegetarian Main Meals on Kindle
Ten Vegetarian Main Meals on Smashwords (multiple formats)
Ten Vegetarian Main Meals on Gumroad (pretty PDF version)
Ten Vegetarian Main Meals on Kobo Books
It’s also available on iBooks, but I don’t have a direct link. Search for “Ten Vegetarian Main Meals”.