Easy Oatmeal Nutrition Bars/ Breakfast Bars

I was searching around the net for some easy snacks and came across some great breakfast bar recipes. Most of them had a lot of stuff not available easily, here in Bangalore. I decided to change some stuff around and experiment a bit with some basic easily available ingredients.

The first time I made the bars they turned out good and crunchy. Unfortunately I had substituted Raisins (Kishmish) instead of some of the hard to find berries, like blueberries, cranberries etc. The raisins bloated up in the oven, popped out of the mix a bit and generally got slightly burnt. The bars were fine though it was just those raisins which had bloated and were rolling around on top of the bars, which I discarded.



Ingredients:
Oat powder - 1/3 cup
*Quick Oats - 1 2/3 cup
Sugar - 1/2-3/4 cup depending on how sweet you want it.
Honey - 1/4 cup
Nuts/ Dry Fruits Assorted  - 2-3 cups
Salt - less than 1/2 tsp or to taste
Cinnamon Powder - 1/2 tsp
Butter melted - 6 Tbsp
Lite Corn syrup or Butter or Vegetable oil - 2 tbsp
*Peanut Butter - 4-5 Tbsp (Optional)
*2 tbsp water

Note:
* I used regular Quakers rolled oats and not the Quick oats. The regular require more water than the quick oats and slightly longer to cook.
*Oat powder can be made by grinding the oats to a powder in a grinder.
* Peanut butter ads a great peanutty flavour but I skipped this.


Preparation:

1. Mix the dry stuff together in a bowl. Mix up all the liquids in another small Bowl.
2. Mix the liquid mix into the dry mix slowly achieving a even crumbly texture.By the time you finish mixing there wont be any liquid floating around.
3. Preheat your oven to 180-190 deg C (around 350 deg F) and grease up a wide baking sheet.
4. Press the mix into bars on the baking sheet. You can use some square mould to do so. You can also justfill the square baking sheet and cut the result into bars later but then the sides do not brown so nicely as on individual bars.
5. Now put the tray with the raw bars into the oven and set the heat to 180-190 deg C (around 350 deg F).
6. Wait for 30-40 mins. The top of the bars should be slightly brown and the result will feel slightly quishy when pressed.
7. Cool this in the oven for 20-30mins and then out on a wire rack till mixture is cool. The nutrition / breakfast bars will firm up when cooled.