Granola Not-Bars

I make a batch of granola bars every couple of weeks to keep in the freezer. They're great snacks to take to work, when I need something quick and nutrient-dense to get me through the afternoon. Generally, I don't even use a recipe. I just throw a bunch of stuff in a bowl, mix it up, press it into a pan, and bake it. Every batch is different, and that's part of the fun! I guess I'm easily amused. I really like making anything where I can just dump stuff in and not worry about ruining it. Granola bars are pretty much like that, because even if they crumble apart, you get granola! And that's good too. And that's what happened with these.

The King Arthur granola bar recipe looked promising, so I decided to follow it... sort of. The recipe calls for a ton of sugar, and I don't like my granola bars to taste like cookies (as much as I love cookies). I used 1/4 cup of brown rice syrup to sweeten the bars, and eliminated all of the other sugar. As it turns out, the sugar is the glue in this recipe. I added about 1/3 cup of peanut butter and 1/4 cup of ground flax seeds to the wet ingredients, but they weren't enough to bind the bars together. Oh no!

Hey, that's a mighty fine lookin' pile of crumbs, King Arthur! (Totally not Arthur's fault. I didn't follow the recipe.)

In any case, these taste great, and they're plenty sweet. I think this is a promising base recipe to work with, but I'll have to tweak it some more to make it work better for me. Applesauce might be the key. I think the batter was just too dry. Also, the recipe calls for the bars to be cut while still warm, which I think is a mistake. As you can see, I ended up with a mess. They might have held up better if I'd waited until they were completely cool before I cut them.

Oh well. I'll keep working on it.