Oh HELLO new recipe! So, recently I’ve kinda fallen back in love with bananas. I’ve been adding them to my Overnight Oats, freezing them for smoothies, and when I wanted to bake my Banana Bread with them last week, I decided to try something new. Because I’ll be kicking off Semester 2 of my Masters pretty soon, I decided to get cracking on a new snack recipe, and it was something lots of you were asking for on my Instagram too!

So here we go – a tasty, energy-packed new snack solution – let’s bake!

Recipe (Makes 16 Squares)

Ingredients

• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 whole eggs
• 2 large ripe bananas + 1 banana sliced length-ways (1/2 for decoration on top, 1/2 for the actual batter!)
• 1/3 cup of honey (you can sub maple syrup here if you prefer)
• 1/3 cup of melted coconut oil or melted cacao butter (I use Cocobrew Cacao Butter) (you could MAYBE use olive oil, but the flavour game would be very different!)
• 150g oats, blended into flour (I use Flahavan’s)
• 1 fistful (about 30g) of chopped raw nuts of choice (I used Hazelnuts but pick your favourite!)
• 1 handful of pitted dates, diced into small pieces (again, alternatives are possible – figs would be great too!)

Method 

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200C (fan oven). Line a square (if not exactly square that’s fine!) baking tin with grease-proof paper or spray with cooking spray. The baking tin should be about 1 inch (ish) deep.
2. Take a large mixing bowl. Add the dry ingredients – oat flour, baking soda, cinnamon and chopped nuts.
3. Using a power blender (I use my Nutri-bullet) or a food processor, blend the bananas (2 + 1/2), eggs, honey and melted coconut oil/cacao butter. Save one 1/2 banana for the decoration on top!
4. Create a small well in the centre of the dry ingredients, and pour in the blended wet mixture. Grab a large spoon, and stir until you have a batter-tastic texture, ensuring all the dry ingredients are well-combined with the wet.
5. Finally, fold in the dates and nuts. Pour the batter into your lined baking tin.
6. Smooth down the batter evenly. Take your sliced banana half, dice it into smaller chunks and lay these on top!
7. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes.
8. Stick a tooth-pick in at the 30 minutes. It should come out mostly clean!
9. Remove from the oven and allow the squares to cool for 20 minutes before tucking in! Store in a sealed tupperware and they should keep for up to 5 days! Or freeze them if you’re batch-baking!

Enjoy guys! Tag me if you try this one out – @theirishbalance on Instagram/Twitter/Facebook! And don’t forget to give my Podcast a listen if you enjoy audio-content – I’m sharing weekly episodes right here!

Ciara 🙂 x