Carrot Cake Breakfast Bars

114 cal, 11C/7F/2P/5S.

I have a confession to make. I LOVE Clif Bars. I could eat sticky sweet Clif Bars for breakfast every day if I could.

And I tried. I gave it a go friends, I bought a whole box of them and started eating one each morning… Cue massive headache around the 10 am mark. Big energy crash around 11 and hardcore hunger and cravings right around lunch. Overeating, feeling tired all afternoon.

I didn’t give up that easy. Maybe it was just that morning? Maybe it was just that week? However after about a week or two it was clear that this breakfast experiment was not serving me. This was about when my added-sugar-awareness kicked into full gear. Yes added sugar tastes delicious but so does actually feeling good!

So instead of giving up on my dreams of having tasty breakfast bars, I now make my own. My favorite Clif Bar happens to be carrot cake. Well let’s inspect the ingredients. First ingredient: Brown Rice Syrup. That means the bar is mostly made of sugar. 25 g per bar to be exact. That explains a LOT. Which is why I made sure my bar’s first ingredient is, you guessed it, blood-sugar stabilizing nuts (and oats in roughly equal proportions). If you eat two of my bars you’ll ingest 10 g of sugar, and none of it is added sugar. Just unsweetened applesauce, carrots and raisins friends. And they taste yummy as hell but don’t take my word for it, bake these and decide for yourselves!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unsweetened applesauce (120 g)
• 1 cup walnut halves (120 g)
• 1 cup rolled oats (80 g)
• 1/4 cup unsweetened coconut flakes (30 g)
• 1/4 cup flax seed meal (26 g)
• 1/2 cup raisins (80 g)
• 1 cup packed finely shredded carrot (100 g)
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp salt

Makes 16 squares. Preheat oven to 350F and line an 8×8 baking dish with parchment. Blend walnuts in a food processor until meal-y (some of it might butterize and that’s fine) add applesauce, flax, coconut, cinnamon and salt, pulse to combine. Fold in oats, carrots, raisins. This should give you a nice bar dough. Press it evenly into the baking dish and bake for 25-30 minutes until the edges are golden and the center is baked. Let it cool completely (ideally overnight in the fridge after the initial cooling in room temp) before slicing into 16 and enjoy! I kept mine refrigerated.

I hope you try and love this recipe and tag @200isplentysweet on instagram if you do! ❤

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