Homemade Fruit and Energy Bars

I started making these fruit/energy bars for my older daughter who is an athlete and trains hard for part of the year. During that time, she relies heavily on "power bars" that she eats before or after practice. I decided to make my own healthy fruit bars as a way to save money and to ensure that my daughter is not consuming too much sugar.

My daughter absolutely loves these!

Fruit Bar Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 cup of dried cranberries
• 1/2 cup of dates
• 1/4 cup of oats
• 1/2 cup of raw whole almonds
• 1 tbsp of honey
• a small handful of semi-sweet chocolate chips (optional)

Instructions

• Put the cranberries, dates, oats and honey in a food processor and mix until everything is well chopped (small pieces).
• Crush the almonds separately (almonds will turn to powder in the food processor).
• Mix the crushed almonds with the rest of the ingredients and stir well.
• Cut small pieces of plastic wrap and have them ready for wrapping the fruit bars.
• Take a handful of the mixture and work it in your hands to form bars (ours are never perfect, they are a different size each time)
• Making the bars is the hardest step because the mixture sticks to your hands. I've added a video to show you how I do this step.
• Once you have a bar, place it on the plastic wrap and start to roll the bar into the plastic, molding the bar as you wrap it.
• Refrigerate the bars to set.
• They should be eaten with 10 days.

This is what I used, but any brand will do.

Almonds from Sam's Club and Wegman's
Cranberries.

This is what the mixture looks like after
processing.

Wrapped fruit bars.

Another one.

A quick note about the process: rolling and shaping these little suckers are a major pain. They stick to your hands but don't want to bind. You have to patiently work them until they are semi together, then use the plastic wrap to shape them better. Here's a short video showing you the rolling/shaping process. Hope this helps!

Substitutions:

If you don't like dates, you can use other dried fruit. I've made these with dried cherries and it turned out great.  You can also use walnuts instead of almonds.

If you make these, stop by again to let me know how you like it. And if you made any changes, I'd love to hear about that too!