Sour Cherry Energy Bars
These Sour Cherry and Nut Fingers are just the thing to have to hand morning, noon and night. I’ve been trying to find an energy bar for sometime to eat in that ‘I’m hungry' spot but have had no luck. At last here is a solution.
These shiny babies are a confection of cashews, pistachios, sour cherries and oats with fruit syrup to bind them together. They are crispy when first made but soften to gently chewy over a week or so. They eat better on day 2 when they’ve softened slightly.
The magic ingredient here is the sour cherries because they have a pleasing sharpness which you don’t generally get with dried fruit. Anything else I’ve tried is just too sweet. I get the sour cherries on line as they are not widely available in the average grocery in the UK.
These Sour Cherry and Nut Fingers are also an instant fix if people drop round for a coffee and you want to give them a sweet treat. After all they keep better than cakes or biscuits and the nutrition is off the scale good relatively speaking.
You might want to bear in mind though that each ‘finger’ has the equivalent of a teaspoon of sugar in it.…
Ingredients
Makes approx 24 generous ‘fingers’
Special requirements - 1 baking tray/swiss roll tin - 25x35x2cms; 1 sugar thermometer or a general kitchen thermometer with a probe
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp green cardamom powder
180ml fruit or maple syrup
1/2tsp fine sea salt
2 tbs olive oil plus extra for greasing the pan
200g ordinary sized oats
70g naked cashews
70g naked pistachio nuts
200g dried sugar free sour cherries
Method
Heat the oven to 165C fan/185C/375F
Grease the baking tin with olive oil and line it with bakewell paper.
Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan. Add the oats and stir fry until they begin to brown. Make sure they don’t stick.
Add the nuts and cook for a further 2 minutes stirring all the time.
Put the mix into a bowl with the cherries, pepper, cardamon and salt.
Take a small saucepan, add the fruit syrup and warm over a medium heat with the thermometer probe sitting in the syrup. To get the bars to stick together the syrup needs to be heated to a temperature of 122C/ F on an instant read thermometer. Watch the thermometer temperature until the reading is the magic 122C. This will take five - ten minutes.
Tip the hot sugar carefully over the oat and cherry mixture and stir well with a heat proof spoon until the sugar has reached all the parts.
Transfer the mix to the prepared pan and spread it out evenly across the tray. Press the mix firmly down and put it into the oven.
Bake for about 20 minutes or until the surface looks golden brown. Take from the oven and let the mix cool completely in the pan.
Lift the bakewell paper and its now set granola out of the tray. Flip it over onto a cutting board leaving the bakewell paper uppermost. Peel off the paper.
Cut the into elegant slices with a sharp knife according to what shape looks good to you. You’ll no doubt get some broken pieces as you go but see these as cook’s perks….
Store in an airtight box for up to 2 weeks.
