Chocolate Almond Oat Bars

My source of Vitamin E!

Elsa’s in the kitchen! Our weekly playdates have evolved into “cooking school,” and this time we’re making Chocolate Almond Oat Bars made with eight delicious, wholesome ingredients: chocolate, peanut butter, honey, butter, almonds, dried cherries, oats, and a wee bit of salt. Brilliant!

For her first cooking school lesson, Elsa requested that we make a soufflé. Typical, four-year-old. Hah! This is one curious, fearless, precocious soon-to-be-five-year-old-kindergardener, and cooking with her is a blast! (We made a cheese soufflé, and Elsa learned how to separate eggs. Here’s what it looked like ~ a masterpiece.)

Because it’s quite summery and hot, I thought a recipe that didn’t require firing up the oven was a particularly good idea. For these bars, we spent a few minutes over the stove top, but the rest was stirring and refrigerating. Here are the specific ingredients:

Chocolate Almond Oat Bars

1/3 cup honey

1 stick butter

1 cup natural almond or peanut butter (9½oz/270g)

½ cup whole almonds, toasted and chopped (2½ oz/71g)

6 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped

¾ cup dried cherries (3¾ oz / 106g)

2 cups old fashioned oats (7oz/200g)

½ teaspoon coarse salt

And here are the directions, with demonstrations by Elsa B!

Prepare pan

Spray 8-inch square pan with vegetable spray

Line with a single piece of parchment paper cut long enough to overlap sides (two sides will be covered along with the bottom, and two sides will be bare)

Prepare the Ingredients

Do all of the chopping and measuring before you begin. (This is good advice for any recipe.) Elsa is particularly skilled at cutting chocolate and measuring peanut butter. She enjoyed hoodwinking Todd by telling him that we’d used the entire jar of peanut butter and there was none left for his afternoon snack. I’m not sure if it’s a Piaget stage, but this preschooler completely grasps the abstract concept of teasing!

Make the Bars

Heat the honey, butter, and peanut butter and salt in a saucepan over medium heat stirring constantly until melted together (about 5 minutes). Reduce the flame to low and stir in the chocolate until just melted.

Off the heat, stir in the remaining ingredients, one at a time.

Put mixture into pan and spread out in an even layer (it’s okay for the top to be “bumpy!”). A small offset spatula is perfect for this job. To facilitate clean up, be sure to lick the spatula. Yum!

Bars ready for the frig

Place in refrigerator, uncovered, two hours or until firm enough to cut

When ready to cut, run sharp knife along the two sides of the pan not covered with parchment, remove binder clips and use the parchment sides to ease square out of the pan. Tip it up on its side to remove the parchment, then lay it down and cut into small squares or bars.

To pass the time while waiting for the bars to set up, Elsa and I recommend reading a good book!