Three Guys One Kitchen

Have you ever tried Kind Bars? There are lots of different flavors, my favorite is the dark chocolate cherry cashew :) In any event, they’re a little too expensive to buy all the time, so I googled a recipe to try and make some at home. I found this recipe and tweaked it a little to come up with this granola bar:

Although this is our first attempt at making granola bars, we figured it would just be a matter of making minor adjustments here and there to the recipe before it’s perfect. So we bought all sorts of wholesome ingredients for future granola bars, too. So everything in this picture wasn’t put in the granola bars, but feel free to mix and match your favorite ingredients to make the recipe all yours!

We split the Planters Pistachio Blend (which has pistachios, cashews, almonds, and peanuts) in half.

We chopped one group of the nuts up, leaving some coarse pieces, and some very fine pieces too.

The recipe calls for one cup of crushed nuts, so we had to grab a few from the other pile and chop them up to fill the measuring cup to the right line

Then we measured out 2 cups of oats and spread them out on a cookie sheet with the nuts and flax seed

We placed that in the oven with a timer for 4 minutes to rotate everything around so it toasts evenly. Meanwhile, we combined the honey, brown sugar, butter, vanilla, and salt into a small saucepan.

We also measured out the dehydrated fruits while the ingredients melted together.

We took the toasted oats, nuts, and flax out of the oven and combined them with the cranberries and dates, and the rest of the whole nuts.

We mixed this around before adding the syrup so the final product would be more even, then we poured the syrup over the mixture.

Then we mixed everything together until the syrup has evenly coated the granola mixture.

Then we lined an 8×8 baking dish with parchment paper so the granola bars wouldn’t stick to the pan, and then poured the mixture on top of the paper.

We then spread out the mixture with the spatula, and then placed a piece of parchment paper over the top of the mixture and began pressing down to compress the mixture. The syrup was a little warm since it just came off the stove, so we used a pot holder to displace the heat.

Press, press, and press the mixture down into the pan. This keeps the bars together when they cool so they’re easier to cut, store, and eat.

When the mixture gets to room temperature (we put the bars in the fridge so it would cool faster, but the parchment paper stuck to the bars really bad. We left them out overnight, which brought them back to room temperature) lift the corners of the parchment paper and remove the block from the pan and place it on a cutting board.

We peeled off the paper slowly so it wouldn’t tear into pieces, and then flipped the block over and did the same thing to the other side.

We pressed a sharp knife down the middle of the block to separate it into two halves.

Then we cut one of the halves into 6 bars, and did the same to the other half.

Then we individually wrapped the 12 bars in saran wrap and stored them in the freezer.