RAW homemade Larabars

If you've ever had a Larabar you would know they're one of the best protein bars for you.. completely raw, some flavors only contain 2 ingredients! An awesome pick me up that tastes amazing but won't bring you down with all those added sugars and artificial flavors of many of the bars out there. I recently discovered that they are very easy to make thanks to Leite's Culinaria. I can attest to the fact they turned out delicious and amazing, they taste identical to the real thing, over time buying ingredients in bulk making them is MUCH cheaper than buying individual bars, and they were surprisingly easy to make.

The two flavors I made were the Oatmeal Cookie and Peanut & Chocolate Cookie Dough. MmmmMMmmmMmmmmmm.. I simplified the instructions here so this is all you gotta do! To try more flavors, follow the same directions but sub out different ingredients. Find the ingredients for other flavors here!

Ingredients for Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Bars:

1 cup of raisins
1 cup of warm water
¾ cup of cashews
¾ cup of rolled oats
½ teaspoon of cinnamon

Directions:

Let raisins soak in warm water for up to 10 minutes. While soaking, blend together everything else in a food processor. Drain the water from the raisins once they are soft (but before they start to disintegrate in the water!) and add them to the mix. Blend again until they form a thick dough-like consistency.

Prepare a loaf pan with plastic cling wrap sprayed lightly with cooking spray (I love coconut oil spray from Trader Joe's). Press mixture into the bottom of the loaf pan until flat. Cover the top with cling wrap so it's completely wrapped up and smooth it out until flattened more. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Remove mixture from fridge, and cut into 6 even bars. Each of these is a normal Larabar portion size, but you can cut them in half again to make mini-bars and to get more bars out of the mixture. Wrap each bar in cling wrap and refrigerate. When you grab them on the go they will last for days in a pocket, purse or backpack but make sure they are wrapped and sealed well!

If you don't have a loaf pan you can use any kind of small pan to flatten the mixture out, just something to create a rectangular mold for the bars. If you don't have anything small enough to use, you can roll them into balls and wrap the balls individually (you'll just have Laraballs instead of Larabars!

Ingredients for Peanut Chocolate Cookie Dough:
(Use same instructions as above but substitute these ingredients)

1 ¼ cups of pitted, soft whole dates*
1 cup of warm water
1 cup of raw peanuts
3 tablespoons of bittersweet or semisweet dark chocolate chips

*Make sure to remove pits from dates after softening in water.. I learned this the hard way after the fact when the pits cracked my food processor!