Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Muesli / Granola

Muesli/Granola is pretty darn easy to make. See, I thought I’d ease myself into the blogging world by sharing my fool proof recipes. I like recipes that are easy and give max results with min ingredients.
There are approximately 45 trillion muesli recipes online and they all have very similar ingredients and more or less the same method. However, it was only after trying and testing over and over again, that I discovered the perfect method. And I have chosen this small space to share it with you, the people of the interwebs.


Ingredients
About 1/3 a cup of honey
3 cups of rolled oats
Seeds of your choice (I usually change it up between sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds and linseeds I usually put a bit of them all in for good measure.)
Nuts of your choice (I usually use cashews or almonds or both)
(you need about a cup full of whatever combination of nuts and seeds you’ll be using)
About ½ a cup flaked or dessicated coconut.
About ½ a cup dried berries or raisins.

Method
Preheat your oven to 150 degrees celsius
Get a mini frying pan and heat the honey (this is the first of my home-learned hints: the honey will be VERY liquidy after heating and so will mix into the oats better)
Put the oats into a mixing bowl and pour in the liquidy honey. Mix like a crazy person so the honey is well dispersed.
Add coconut (if using)
Spread on a tray and bake for 10 minutes
Remove from the oven

Add the nuts and seeds and swoosh it around the baking tray so it becomes evenly dispersed (and also so the oats and coconut get flipped so that they don’t burn).
Bake for another 10 minutes
Take the tray out again and mix the ingredients around so that they are flipped to avoid burnage.

Bake for another 10 - 15 minutes
(You may be wondering why I’ve chosen to do this in a rather labour intensive manner, so here comes the second tip: I've found that putting all the ingredients together and letting them bake for the full 30 mins results in too-close-to-burnt nuts and seeds, it pretty much ruins the taste for me so the tip is to add those ingredients after 10 minutes to ensure that awesomeness prevails).
Once the muesli has baked for 30 to 35 mins. Take out of the oven and let cool. Once cool add the raisins (third tip: adding the raisins at any stage during the baking process gives you hard, tough raisins. Adding them at the very end means the raisins stay chewy and delicious).
Also, I recently discovered that dried cranberries are amazing with my muesli, so I have been skipping the raisins in favour of cranberries, though if you’re feeling particularly crazy there is no reason not to add both :)

1 comment:

Caylee said...

Candice, what gorgeous photos ! Especially the second one. It makes me want to scoop all of the muesli up in my hands and throw it in the air. And then eat it.