I’m not one for buying energy type bars. Personally I get enough calories (energy) from what I already eat. But there are times when your craving a little something sweet. Those cravings usually hit me when I’m grocery shopping and surrounded by aisle after aisle of the processed junk food of my past. Instead of giving in I decided to check out the growing energy and protein bar section.

Protein bars are out. The manufacturing process to create the various wheys and isolates damages the protein so the bars aren’t as healthy as we are lead to believe. This still leaves a bunch of energy bars left. Some are filled with lots of processed junk, artificial flavors, added sugar and other unnecessary ingredients. A few that I’ve tried have left a lot to be desired in the taste department. From reading other blog posts I had heard that a Lara bar might be a good choice so I grabbed one.

The Lara bar ingredients are kept to a minimum. In the case of the Apple Pie bar I picked up it only contained dates, almonds, unsweetened apples, walnuts, raisins and cinnamon. Thats it. No added flavorings, colors, proteins or other junk. I’ve never been a big date fan before so I was worried that I wouldn’t like it. Not only did I like it, I loved it! Sweet enough but not sticky sweet. Just the right amount of apple flavor and spice. It was great. Of course, with so few ingredients, there had to be a way to make these at home. A quick web search lead me to this site: Enlightened Cooking and the Lara bar recipe at the site. 

The recipe at Enlightened Cooking blog has some great pictures so check it out. Sadly I’m lucky I know how to turn my camera on and off so my pictures look nothing like those. I am also lacking a large food processor which would help in making these bars so much easier. Here’s my larger sized version of the Enlightened Cooking’s version.

Homemade Lara Type Bars or Bon Bons

1 to 1 1/4 cup nuts (varied depending upon flavor)

1/2 cup gound raisins

1 cup coarsely chopped dates

Additional ingredients depending upon the type of bar your making

Coarsely chop the dates. Add to your food processor and pulse until they form a paste. Since my processor is small it doesn’t have the power to get it really paste like. Instead I ended up being able to only process them until they began to clump together. Then the processor started wheezing and slowly down. Needless to say there were still finely diced bits in the dates.

Repeat the procedure with the raisins.  The ground raisins are on the left and the dates are on the right side of the picture below. Put the ground fruit into a large bowl.

Don’t bother cleaning out the processor. Simply toss your chosen nuts in and pulse them until finely chopped. The nuts will help remove the date/raisin paste that is stuck to the sides of your processor.  Add in any spices, vanilla or additional ingredients you may want. Toss the nut mixture into the bowl with your fruit.

Wash your hands and then knead the nuts and fruits together until blended. Once mixed you can pat the mixture into bar shapes on plastic wrap like this:

Or you can roll them in your hands to form little bon bon like balls.

I made two types of mixes this time. I tried to make an apple pie type of blend. I used a nut blend of half almonds and half pecans along with 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon and a dash of vanilla extract. Along with the raisins and dates I added dried apple pieces. I don’t have an exact recipe since I sort of blend up large amounts of each item (nuts, raisins, dates, etc) and then blend them together until I like the consistency. It’s an annoying habit to not use exact amounts unless baking. Play around with the measurements because you never know if you’ll like something better unless you try.

The second blend I made was a chocolate chip cookie. In place of the almond/pecan blend I used only cashews and added 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract. In the raisin/date mixture I added 1/3 cup mini chocolate chips.

Perhaps in the future I will be able to pick up a real food processor which would make it so much easier to create these goodies. If anyone out there is looking for someone to do a test review of their processor give me a yell. I would be more then happy to give it a good test run

Do you make energy or some other type of fruit based bars? If so feel free to leave a link in the comment section below. I’d love to try some other types of bars.

This post is being linked to the following blogs – stop by and check out all the other great recipes, tips and info posted:

Two for Tuesdays being held at A Moderate Life, GirliChef, Rendering Lard and Frugal Crunchy Christy

Real Food Wednesday at Kelly The Kitchen Kop

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