Homemade Rice Krispy Cereal Bars

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{This is a guest post by Carly Trigg of My Well Being Journal. Try her homemade rice krispy cereal bars recipe, and be sure to check out her other delicious and healthy creations on her blog as well.}

Healthy Recipes: Homemade Rice Krispy Cereal Bars

Despite cereal bars being commonly associated with inherent ‘good health’, a lot of those pesky food companies out there have taken all the joy right out of cereal bars.

Packing them with sugars, additives and oils, it’s no wonder these are actually one of the worst products for your health as it goes.

Just look at the originator – the Rice Krispy Milk Cereal Bar. The name forever suggested to parents that these were healthy – they were packed full of calcium and were a good way to start the day, right?

Wrong. Each 20g bar (so about 4 bites, and much less than a bowl of heart-healthy cereal with milk) contains 7g sugar, 2g fat, 1.5g of this being saturated fat. This makes perfect sense when you consider how the rice cereal itself is made up primarily of sugar, salt and barley malt flavoring.

This is only skimming the surface too, when it comes to the different sugars  you’ll find in this seemingly harmless cereal bar. Sugars in various forms include table sugar, glucose syrup, invert sugar syrup and fructose. You’ll also be bombarded a multitude of oils, such as vegetable oil, palm oil, palm kernel oil and coconut oil.

So why do we eat these horrible little things?

You wouldn’t be satisfied with a cereal bar in the same way you would a bowl of cereal, simply because the nutrients aren’t the same. Most commercial cereal bars are as bad nutritionally as a candy bar, and that’s a fact. Some candy bars even do better when their nutrients are compared against a standard cereal bar, usually containing more fiber and fewer sugars(!!).

A touch of baking nostalgia

As a child, you might have tried to replicate your favourite cereal bars. Unaware of what it meant for your health, you might have pumped the rice krispies full of syrup, butter, caramel and marshmallow, and absolutely loved it.

Now, in later life and with more awareness of good health, it’s important to swerve the unhealthy cereal bars on our shelves, and the bad homemade interpretations, and start going for a healthier, more nutrient-rich cereal bars.

It is possible.

I promise you.

And here’s the recipe to prove it.

Make me happy!

This recipe replaces:
sugary white puffed rice >> brown rice
syrups >> natural honey
oils >> nut butter and sticky, delectable fruits

Try it out for size, for you and the kids in your life – I can promise they won’t even notice the difference!

Rice Krispy Cereal Bars – Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups puffed brown rice (be sure the variety you choose are gluten free)
• 1 cup almond/peanut butter
• 1 ripe banana
• 3/4 cup dates (soaked overnight)
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1 tbsp oil
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp mixed spice

Method

1. Combine almond butter, honey and oil in a saucepan and heat until runny. Peanut butter may not need quite so long.
2. In a food processor, blitz the nut butter mixture, banana, dates, and spices. This should go creamy pretty quickly.
3. Pour the mixture over the puffed rice in a large, flat baking dish and combine with a spoon until all the rice is covered sufficiently. Once satisfied, pat down with the back of a spoon to keep it glued.
4. Freeze for 2 hours and then cut up into rice krispy cereal bars squares. Yum!