Granola bobola banana fana fo fola

We like granola bars in our house to snack on.  You feel like you are eating something healthy yet tasty.  I found this granola recipe on pinterest from a blog called Back to the Cutting Board.  They are so easy and so good! I adapted the recipe she adapted from Rachel Ray and made the S-mores bars and then made my own by using the chocolate chip recipe.  All three recipes have the same 5 main ingredients to make the granola bars, honey, brown sugar, unsalted butter, oats, and rice crispies.

 Using her recipe I added the necessary ingredients and then added my own.  Think of them as cookies, experimenting, add what you would to a cookie

Base Ingredients:
1/2 stick of unsalted butter
1/4-1/2 C packed light brown sugar
1/4 C honey
2C. plain granola (I use Back to Nature Granola)
1C. Rice Crispies
1- 1 1/2 C. added goodies (see ideas below)

First I made Chocolate Toffee Bites adding a 1/2 Cup Chocolate chips and 1/2 cup Heath bar broken up into chips. The reason they were Chocolate Chip Bites was because I did what she said NOT to do, freeze or refrigerate them! I was getting impatient and decide that a minute would not matter, well...I forgot about them and a minute turned into a lot more! The were rock hard, like she said they would be.  So I made one bag of bites and another of crushed for a yogurt topping. They still tasted good!!  I learned later that if this happens you can leave them at room temperature for an hour and they soften enough to cut stripes.

toffee bites

crushed bits for yogurt

Then I made a Peanut Butter Marshmallow adding 1 cup of Marshmallow, which needs to be added while the oat mixture is still hot to melt them a little, and 1/2 cup peanut butter chips.  They were pretty good!

One of my favorites was the Mint Chocolate Chip Bars!! I added 1C. Mint Chocolate baking chips to the base recipe   This past week I made a double batch of Cran-raisin bars. I separated the batch making one half into White Chocolate Cran-raisin Bars. To make these I added 1C of each ingredient (half measurements for 1 batch), raisins, dried cranberries, and 1/2 C. white chocolate cut up into small pieces. They were my family's favorite! After I made each batch I set them in a 10 x 10 baking pan and let them set together. Then I cut them into 16 bars and wrapped them like she said in her blog, with parchment. They do look nice like that and it is easy to label them with a marker.

cut square into 16 - not great example but you get it hopefully

Well I hope you have fun making your own! If you have a discount store like I do this can be a very inexpensive treat. My total cost for the ingredients was $7 for 32 Bars, otherwise this may not be something you will be making a lot of. Unless you make your own granola, that seems to be the biggest expense for the recipe.

ENJOY!