Monday, April 8, 2013

Fabulous Flourless Raspberry Lemon Granola Bars

Ingredients:
-1 6 oz container of Chobani Lemon Greek Yogurt
-1 C oats
-4 TB almond meal
-1/2 C freeze dried raspberries from Trader Joe's
-1/8th C honey
-Couple of drops of both vanilla and lemon extract
-Optional 1/4 C Kraft Jet Puffed Mallow Bits (if you don't want to add these, consider chopped up almonds, white chocolate chips, freeze dried blueberries, graham cracker pieces, etc.)

Preheat your oven to 350 and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. 

Mix up all the ingredients to form a somewhat moist batter.  Get out heaping tablespoons of the batter at a time and form into relatively square pieces.  You can put it all out at once and cut it after baking, but this was much more user friendly in my opinion.

Bake for about 10 minutes or until the bars are set and starting to turn golden.  Let them cool on the pan a couple of minutes and transfer to wire racks to cool.  The recipe should make about 20 bars depending on how big you make them.

So, in as much (or little) as I know about nutritional facts, I am pretty darn certain these are packing some serious health in them.  Now, ok, the marshmallow bits maybe don't add quite the healthy pizzazz that the raspberries do, but they serve their own purpose by making your inner child happy.  And that is well worth it.  They really also don't kill the healthiness of the bar either.

The freeze dried raspberries from Trader Joe's are one of my favorite newfound products because the serving size is the ENTIRE BAG!!  What?!?! You never see those words any more.  Fantastic.  The entire bag also has about half the vitamin C you need, a good amount of iron, fiber, other healthy mumbojumbo.  Ridiculous.  Ridiculously delicious.

Chobani, as always, packs a serious punch when it comes to protein and healthy goodness.

Lemon and raspberry combined is one of my favorite flavor pairs.  The honey adds just enough sweetness to them to make these things taste like cookies.  You could put a white chocolate drizzle over them if you so desired to make them more candy-like, but in all reality it is not needed.  They have just the right amount of sweet and a perfect amount of bright fruity flavors to get devoured.

I would personally recommend refrigerating them to get the longest shelf life out of them...not that they will last that long from the standpoint of me not being able to keep away from them.  My only hope at this point is that I can stay out of these long enough to share them with my mom when I go back home in a few days, because she would really like this flavor profile as well.

Does something still count as healthy if you eat the entire batch of it....

Don't answer that.

Happy crafting!


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