I like food and I love treats. In fact, I think I’ve debased their significance by having about one a day (and more, if I’m honest).
For the most part, a treat is largely devoid of nutritional value and full of sugar or fat. I do enjoy a carrot or a satsuma, but lets face it, they’re not treats are they?
So I’m posting this recipe because I think that it is enjoyable enough to be a treat and also has genuine nutritional value. It would seem that these days, every other unprocessed food in the shops is labelled as a super food. Well, here is a super treat!
You will need:
- 350g Porridge Oats
- 50g Unsweetened coconut flakes
- 50g Raisons
- 50g Kasha – roasted buckwheat groats. The hardest thing to source but not essential. You’ll probably need a Health Food Shop, or maybe Waitrose. Is there anything that place doesn’t stock? I’m sure if I asked for a gramme of coke the staff would politely try to oblige. If you want an easier alternative then Sunflower seeds work well.
- 2 medium (ish), ripe bananas. Over ripe is fine, under ripe is not.
- 50 ml Vegetable oil – sunflower or rapeseed. Not olive oil though.
- 100ml of roughly 50:50 Molasses and Barley Malt Extract. You might need a health food shop for these two as well.
- 300ml Apple Juice
So you’ll see from the ingredient list that it is also sugar free and vegan!
Combine the oats, coconut, raisons and kasha (if using) and mix them up in a big bowl. Add the apple juice and then the vegetable oil. Next add your mashed bananas – it gets a bit harder to mix but you don’t want big lumps of banana in the final mixture.
Finally add your molasses/malt extract combo. By this time your mixture will be quite heavy, but persevere with the mixing so that the molasses/malt extract is thoroughly distributed.
Put your mixture into the cake tin. I generally use a round shaped flan tin, about 9 inches in diameter. Oops….lapsed into imperial… make that about 24 cm. It doesn’t really matter, but do line the tin with greaseproof paper. Unless that is, you’ve discovered the delights of silicone bakeware. You weren’t still thinking that silicone was only for boobs were you?
Anyway, we digress. What you bake it in doesn’t matter massively as long as the cooking time reflects the depth of the bakeware that you use. For my 24cm round tin I cook at gas mark 4 (180 degrees C) for about 45 minutes.
It might be a bit softer in the middle compared to on top, but that doesn’t matter. It tastes nice on the soft side and not too brittle.
Enjoy!
