Muesli Cake Bars

These are tasty and filling, they have a low GI and a high protein and fibre content, and at a pinch could even be used as a replacement for breakfast.  The classic fruit-and-nut combinations (peanut and raisin, date and walnut and so on) are classics for a reason, so try one of those for your flavour theme, or just use whatever you’ve got and take pot luck – it’ll probably be fine.  My current batch contains chopped dried apricots, dried cranberries and chopped walnuts.

This is another of those “never quite the same” recipes that I bash together really quickly.  The results are therefore a bit variable.  I’ve come to realise over the years that an awful lot of my cooking is done like this; no exact quantities, casual substitution of one ingredient for another, and so on.  I’m winging it a lot of the time, even when I cook for guests.  It works, so I keep on doing it, and I suppose once you have the confidence to start playing it by ear like that, you can only get better at it.  Certainly worth giving it a whirl.

Because, honestly, cooking isn’t rocket science, or chemistry, or alchemy.  If your variations and substitutions are sensible and you keep to more-or-less the right proportions, you’ll almost certainly end up with something perfectly edible.  Be prepared to have a go and see what happens.

What do I mean by “sensible” in this context?  Come on, take a guess.  Make sure there’s enough of the raising agent in proportion to the dry mix when baking, know what different spices and herbs taste like and which ones can be swapped, don’t substitute smoked salmon for raisins or coffee for grated cheese unless you are prepared to eat something that may taste very peculiar indeed…   

Your quiche recipe specifies Emmenthal cheese but you don’t have any?  Yes, you can still make the quiche.  Use another cheese – almost any other with a strong flavour.  You’re about to make muffins and realise you only have one egg and no milk?  Try making a much stiffer mixture, spooning out on a greased and lined baking sheet and baking it as cookies instead.  They may not be tremendous but they’ll almost certainly be perfectly edible.

Anyway, back to the Muesli cake bars.

1 ½ cups porridge oats or gf oatmeal

1 ½ cups No 1 Baking mix or No 2 Baking mix

½ cup desiccated coconut

½ cup chopped dried fruit of one kind or another

½ cup chopped nuts

¼ cup mixed seeds such as pumpkin and sunflower

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 large over-ripe banana, mashed

2 tsp xylitol (optional – and I’d leave it out these days.  If the banana is really ripe that will give quite a lot of sweetness)

2 eggs

2 tblsp veg oil or 2 oz/50g melted butter or margarine

½ tsp vanilla essence

Milk to mix

Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl and stir together.  Mix the wet ingredients together and stir into the dry; add a little milk if necessary to get a soft but dense mixture.  It should be distinctly stiffer than an average cake mix, more like the mix for flapjacks (which these are a protein-rich cousin to).  Spread in a lined baking tin about 8” square and smooth down; mark into bars by cutting most of the way through.  Bake for 35-40 minutes at 150 degrees C in a fan oven, until golden on top.  Remove and cool, and break down the marked divisions.

Low GI muesli

A visitor recently was kind enough to compliment my home-made muesli.  It isn’t something you expect anyone to notice, breakfast cereal.  So I appreciated the remark, and here's the recipe as a way of saying thank you.

Breakfast is probably my main carb meal most days.  Unlike most commercial mueslis which contain oats and wheat, this is based just on oats, and has no dried fruit either.  So it has a fairly low glycaemic index, although please note, it’s not nut-free and would only be gluten-free if made with gf oats.  It isn't exactly low-carb, though leaving out the dried fruit makes it much lower-carb than normal shop-bought muesli.  But what it is is a good filling breakfast, with slow-digested carbs and plenty of fibre, plus some healthy fats and and a small amount of protein from the nuts and seeds.

I make this with jumbo oats when I can get them.  They cost a bit more than ordinary porridge oats, but not a huge amount, and the texture is vastly better.  

You will need:

Porridge oats or jumbo oats or gluten-free oats

Oatbran (optional - I don’t think gf oatbran is widely available, though logically it must exist)

Flaked almonds

Broken or chopped brazil nuts

Hazelnuts, preferably roasted

Pumpkin seeds  }

Linseeds            } - (or a ready-made seed mixture, like H&Bs “Omega mix”)

Sunflower seeds}

Take a large glass or clear plastic storage jar with a tight-fitting lid (I use a two litre Kilner jar).  In it, put the ingredients in layers, starting with the seeds and nuts.  Exact measurements don’t matter, but I would aim to have thicker layers of seeds and thinner layers of nuts; maybe 1½  to 2cm of each of the seeds and 1cm of each of the nuts.  I like to vary it; this batch, for example, is a bit heavy on the sunflower seeds.

You want the seeds and nuts together to fill about two fifths of the jar.  Next, fill the jar almost to the top with oats and finish off with a couple of tablespoons of oatbran.  

Now empty the whole lot into a large bowl and stir together thoroughly.  

Spoon back into the same jar and you’re done. 

Serve with milk or plain yoghurt, and added fresh fruit if you want. 

No-added-sugar rich fruit cake

I've been meaning to post this for ages, in fact since Christmas...

This is adapted from my mother’s family Christmas cake recipe, switching the fruits for less-sugary ones (so, for example, no candied peel) and removing all added sugar.  It made a lighter cake than usual but one with a really good fruity flavour and fantastic golden colour.  It kept well and still tasted good after a week.  Unlike a conventional Christmas cake, though, I don’t think it would respond well to being made a month in advance.

4oz/100g blanched whole almonds, chopped

4oz/100g raisins

8oz/200g dried apricots, chopped

2oz/50g dried mango, thinly sliced

2oz/50g dried cherries

Juice of 1 large lemon

1 tea bag, made into tea (can be herbal or normal tea, but NB no milk! I used a spicy rooibos blend)

4oz butter

4 tsp xylitol

3 large eggs

2 tsp vanilla essence

4 tsp ground mixed spice

4 heaped tsp baking powder, sieved

2 cups No 1 baking mix

Whole blanched almonds, whole walnuts or pecans and whole dried apricots to decorate

Soak raisins and apricots in tea, and dried mango in lemon juice, for at least a couple of hours.  Cream butter and xylitol together and beat in the eggs one by one along with the vanilla.  Drain the soaked fruit, reserving some of the remaining liquid, and stir the soaked fruit, the cherries and the chopped almonds into the mixture, then gradually stir in the baking mix, spice and baking powder, adding some of the fruit soaking liquid if necessary to get a soft, dropping consistency.  Line a medium-sized, fairly deep cake tin with greaseproof paper or baking parchment and spoon the mixture in, level it off and decorate the top with a pattern of nuts and dried fruit.  Bake at 150 degrees C (fan oven) for 45 minutes to 1 hour.  Test with a skewer or narrow knife blade; when the blade comes out clean it’s done.  Remove and cool for 20-30 minutes in the tin before turning out onto a cake rack.

Banana tahini slices

You can buy tahini, the powerful-tasting sesame seed paste used in eastern Mediterranean cookery, in Holland and Barrett and other health food shops and in larger supermarkets.  This started out as a muffin recipe (you’ll notice the method is the same).  But although I liked the taste I felt they were far too doughy.  So today I tried it again as a tray bake and the result is excellent; I got eight fairly thin bars which are crispy on the outside and moist inside, chewy but not stodgy.  The combination of flavours is delicious, faintly reminiscent of sesame halva.

1 large ripe banana

1 egg

1 full tbsp tahini

½ tsp vanilla essence

½ tsp almond essence

1 cup No 1 baking mix

¼ cup sesame seeds

¼ cup raisins

1 heaped tsp baking powder

1 level tsp xylitol

1 level tsp cinnamon

Mix the dry ingredients together and toss through the raisins.  Beat the egg and mash the banana, mix the two together and stir in the tahini and the two flavouring essences.  

 The wet mixture looks pretty horrible - gooey and faintly glaucous - but fear not!   

Beat the wet into the dry mixture, adding a little water if need be to get a soft dropping consistency.  Spoon into a greased and lined baking tray measuring approx 20x20cm, smooth off – it will be quite a thin layer – and bake at 140 degrees C (fan oven) for 30-40 minutes.  Turn out and cool, then cut into bars.

More muffins for springtime

A couple of slightly unusual variations on the muffin theme.

Savoury muffins

Because some people don't like sweet stuff!

1 cup/ 100g/ 4 oz No 1 baking mix

1/3 cup/ 25g/ 1 oz oatmeal or gf porridge oats

1/3 cup/ 25g/ 1 oz grated parmesan cheese

1 heaped tsp poppy seed

2 heaped tsp sunflower seed

1 tsp baking powder

Black pepper

10 stoned green olives, chopped

1 egg

Water – at least ½ cup/ 125ml

Stir dry ingredients together thoroughly.  Blend wet ingredients together and stir into dry ingredients, adding more water if needed to make a dropping consistency, then stir the chopped olives through the mixture.  Spoon into a greased muffin pan or similar and bake at 200 degrees C for about 35 minutes.  Makes around 6 muffins.

These keep for about three to four days and are good split and buttered.

Sesame apple muffins

A twist on the usual muffin model with this recipe, as the maize meal goes into the wet ingredients, not the dry ones.  This gives it a kind of pre-soak, and seems to counteract that slightly gritty texture you can get otherwise with cornmeal/polenta products.

The main background picture for this blog is a photo of a tray of these, incidentally.

1 cup/ 4 oz/ 100g No 1 baking mix

1 heaped tsp baking powder

1 heaped tsp xylitol

2 tsp cinnamon

3 tsp sesame seeds for the mixture, plus about the same again to top the muffins

1/3 cup/ 1 ½ oz 45g fine maize meal or fine polenta

1/3 cup cold water

2 heaped tsp tahini

1 small tart apple

½ tsp vanilla essence

1 large or 2 small eggs

1 tbsp vegetable oil

More water – probably about another 1/3 cup

Mix the maize meal with 1/3 cup of water and leave to soak for 10-15 minutes.  Mix together the baking mix, baking powder, xylitol, cinnamon and sesame seeds.  Grate the apple, cored but with the peel still on, and stir into the maize meal and water.  Add the tahini, oil and vanilla and stir thoroughly, then beat the egg and add.  Mix the wet ingredients into the dry and add more water as needed to get a rather wet mixture.  Spoon into muffin cups or a bun tin and top each muffin with ½ a tsp of sesame seeds.  Bake at 150 degrees C for 35 – 40 minutes.  

These are really good cut in half and toasted when they’re a couple of days old.