OMG It’s August!!!  I’m never going to catch up!  I’m pretty sure this has been the busiest summer of my life!  The weather has been fabulous this weekend!  I didn’t want to turn on the oven, but I wanted to make energy bars, so I researched no-bake energy bar recipes.  These Strawberry Vanilla Energy Bars were the result of my investigation.

I realize the bar thing might be getting out of control.  But, I had to sneak this last one in before I promise to give it a rest for a couple of weeks or months.  These bars were inspired by energy bars called Cake Batter Energy Bars from the blog “Chocolate Covered Katie”.  I was going to copy the recipe outright and give Katie all the credit but I was missing a couple if the items it called for.  So I’ll give Katie like 98% of the credit and I’ll take 2% for my “two cents worth”.

These are the first healthy homemade bars of mine that taste 100% naughty.  In fact, I don’t know if I will make them again because it was difficult to stop myself from eating them all.  And, although each bar is low in calories, if you eat every single one of them you will probably consume a good portion of your caloric intake for the day.  What I’m trying to say is that these bars are really, really good!  I will agree with and quote Katie in saying, “These bars will rock your face off!”

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Strawberry Vanilla Energy Bars

Ingredients

• 1 cup 30 g rice crispies (regular or brown rice)
• ¼ 40 g cup oat flour
• 1 scoop 30 g vanilla protein powder (I used: PlantFusion Protein Vanilla Bean)
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 3 Tbsp. maple almond butter
• 5 Tbsp. agave
• 40 g dried strawberries chopped into small pieces

Instructions

1. Line a standard bread loaf pan with parchment paper.
2. In a large mixing bowl stir to combine the rice cereal, the oat flour, and the protein powder.
3. In a small mixing bowl stir to combine the vanilla, the salt, the nut butter, and the agave.
4. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry and stir well to combine (mixture will be very thick and sticky).
5. Stir the dried strawberries into the mixture.
6. With a rubber spatula scrape the mixture into the parchment lined bread pan.
7. Spread out evenly in the pan.
8. Cut a little piece of parchment to cover the top surface of the bars.
9. Stack another bread pan on top of that parchment paper.
10. Press down (hard) on the top pan to compact the mixture.
11. Place the bars in the frige for at least 1 hour to let the bars set up.
12. When you are ready remove bars from the fridge, remove the top layer of the parchment paper, pull bars from the pan by grasping the parchment paper.
13. Cut into 8 bars and EAT!!!
14. Note: If you don’t have oat flour you can grind oatmeal into flour (using a food processor).
15. Note:I stored these bars individually in the freezer. They are amazing straight out of the freezer!!!
16. Note: This recipe was adapted from the Cake Batter Energy Bar recipe at Chocolate Covered Katie.