Breakfast food!

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post, which means I got some of the products I’m using for free. All opinions in this post are my own and I’m very careful with accepting sponsored posts. See full disclaimer here.

Do you eat oatmeal for breakfast? I often do, but I also love to grab a granola bar when I’m in a hurry. However, store-bought granola bars usually come in individual wrappers, which makes for a lot of waste, and they’re often way too sweet, so it is actually cheaper, tastier and more eco-friendly to make your own custom ones. If you look at the homemade granola bar recipes online, you’ll see that most of them use honey or nut butters like almond or peanut butter as a binding agent, to help the ingredients stick together. Personally, I’m not a fan of too much honey and nut butters can be very filling, so I prefer to keep my granola bars simple and use flaxseeds and fruit to stick them together.

Here’s a simple recipe for oat coconut granola bars with apples, another one in collaboration with Rastoča Jablana, a Slovenian eco healthy food store. By the way, jablana means apple tree in Slovenian and in this recipe I used their eco coconut flakes and eco fine oatmeal.

Oat coconut granola bars recipe

Ingredients

• 80g (1 cup) eco oatmeal
• 40 g (1/2 cup) eco coconut flakes
• 3 tablespoons flaxseeds
• 1 medium-sized apple
• 60 ml (1/4) cup oat or coconut milk
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• a pinch of salt
• Optional: 1 tablespoon honey

Prep time: 5 minutes

Baking time: 20 minutes

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 200°C (392°F). Soak the flaxseeds in 1/4 cup of your chosen milk (oat, coconut or cow milk) for 5 minutes.

Wash and core the apple. Put all the ingredients together in a blender/food processor and blend until smooth. Line a tray with baking paper and evenly spread the mixture on the tray. Press it own firmly so it sticks together together and make sure there are no holes – the easiest way to do that is to put another piece of baking paper on top of the granola mixture and press it down with your hands or the bottom of a cup.

Bake for 20 minutes, let it cool and cut into bars of desired size. Enjoy!

This recipe makes about 4 large oat coconut granola bars.

You can use it as the base for all sorts of granola bars, so feel free to add in other ingredients like sunflower or chia seeds, banana, almonds, hazelnuts, nut butters, honey or chocolate. You can also replace nutmeg with cinnamon for a more Christmas-y vibe, because homemade granola bars also make great last minute Christmas presents.

So, what do you think? How do you like your granola bars – sweet or less sweet?

Download printable PDF here