Christmas time or any Festive time, we tend to indulge in buying a lot of food stuff which doesn’t get eaten. In our house, we tend to buy a variety of nuts with the intention of eating them but often end up with jars of leftovers. Nuts tend to get bitter or rancid after a while so using them to make them into bars is a nice way of creating something that can be eaten or given as a gift too. The bars I made are vegan and use a small amount of brown sugar and jaggery.
Jaggery: For this recipe I used a shop bought jaggery which was slightly lighter in colour. Jaggery is made from unrefined cane sugar. This product is called Gor or gud and when we were in Kenya- it was available quite cheaply so it was used instead of sugar by a lot of us. It was also believed that Jaggery was healthier than sugar so another reason for using it. For me, I just love the taste of sweets and desserts made from jaggery. You can read more about jaggery here.
Vegan Butter : This helps to bind the bars and gives it a richer flavour – almost similar to butter. Plus it sets better than oil so I prefer to use it in this recipe
Ingredients
- 350 grams mixed nuts
- 50 grams porridge oats
- 150 gms jaggery
- 50 grams of demerera sugar
- 110 gms of vegan butter
Method
- Grease a tray or line it with grease proof paper.
2. Lightly dry roast the nuts by cooking them for 30 seconds a time in the microwave. I cooked them for 2 minutes. You can roast them in a hot dry wok too and roast for 3-4 minutes.
3. Transfer these to a blender and add the porridge oats to the mixture. Just blend the nuts to your liking/ I like to keep my nut pieces fairly large.
4. In a large wok heat the vegan butter and add the jaggery and brown sugar once the butter melts. As it’s vegan butter, you may see that the liquid butter looks watery. That’s quite normal.
5. Once the mixture looks runny, add in the ground nuts and stir in cooking at a very low heat. I like my bars to be chewy so once I see the mixture has all blended I turn off the heat. If you like your bars to be crispy – then you can cook it for a couple more minutes.
6. Transfer the mixture to your greased tray and pack it in using the back of a spoon.
7. Allow this to cool for 10-20 minutes and then using a sharp nice cut them into the shapes you like. If you wish to make smalls balls of this mixture, you could do that too. Bars are easy to cut and store.
8. Once cool, Store the bars in a biscuit tin and enjoy these bars fresh.
9. If you wish to gift these bars, pack them in airtight containers.
You may wish to checkout the following easy and different recipes for snack bars from my blog. These recipes can be made vegan using vegan substitutes.
- Muesli or granola bars
- Goji berry cereal bars Powder
- Nutty Energy Ladoos with dates
- Ferrero Richer and whole nut topped bars
- Dates, Nuts and Protein Energy Balls
- Mixed Nuts Barfi with Dates
- Oats, Peanut Butter and Protein Powder Bars
- Choco nut Energy Bars
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