Healthy Granola Bar Recipe

Coconut Chocolate Chip Granola Bars

With this easy healthy granola bar recipe, you can whip up your own delicious granola bars in no time at all!

Granola bars are perfect camping snacks. However, store-bought processed bars are full of sugar and additives. They're fine for an occasional treat, but you might not feel good about serving them regularly - especially if your family eats as many as my family does on a typical camping trip!

Besides, we eat lots of other less-than-healthy snacks when we go camping: things like Smores and hot dogs and potato chips. I like to provide healthy choices whenever I can, to balance out the junk food!

Using this healthy granola bar recipe means that I know exactly what goes into our snack.

A homemade granola bar on a yellow plate with a glass of milk

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Healthy Granola Bar Recipe

Mix up a batch or two of these at home - and then hide them so that they don't get eaten before you leave on your trip!

How to make this healthy granola bar recipe

Get ready

Preheat your oven to 350F/180C.

Grease an 8 x 11 inch/20 x 28 cm glass pan.

Get out your ingredients:

2 cups/500 mL rolled oats

1 cup/250 mL flour

1/2 cup/125 mL raisins

1/3 cup/80 mL dried cranberries

1/3 cup/80 mL chocolate chips

1/3 cup/80 mL unsweetened coconut

1/4 cup/60 mL unsalted sunflower seeds

1 egg

1/2 cup/125 mL melted butter

1/4 cup/60 mL maple syrup

1 Tbsp/15 mL honey

The ingredients for homemade granola bars in a large mixing bowl

Get to work

In a medium-sized bowl, mix the oats, flour, raisins, cranberries, chocolate chips, coconut and sunflower seeds.

dry ingredients for granola bars in a bowl

In a large bowl, beat the egg.

Add the melted butter, maple syrup and honey.

Mix well.

large bowl with eggs and honey and maple syrup and butter

Add the dry ingredients to the large bowl.

dry ingredients added to wet ingredients in large bowl

Mix well.

Do you have a spatula spoon yet? I highly recommend them, for all kinds of mixing!

You can purchase one here!

Classic Spatula Spoon

Transfer to the baking dish.

Spread evenly and press down firmly.

glass baking dish with granola bar mixture

Bake for about 30 minutes, or until brown around the edges.

Immediately cut into bars or squares.

Leave in the pan until cool.

Transfer to a cooling rack and let sit for a while, to harden up a bit.

Pack in an airtight container (if you can prevent your family from eating them immediately!)

Substitutions

Go ahead, be creative! Make these granola bars your own.

No dried cranberries? Use more raisins instead.

Experiment with using pumpkin seeds or sesame seeds instead of, or in combination with, the sunflower seeds.

You might want to use butterscotch chips instead of the chocolate chips.

I don't recommend substituting anything for the coconut. It seems to be necessary for helping to hold everything together.

If you don't have a pan the same size as mine, go ahead and use what you have. Adjust the cooking times accordingly. If your bars are thinner than mine, they'll cook faster. I don't suggest making them much thicker than mine, though; they might not cook in the middle.

No time to make homemade granola bars?

This healthy granola bar recipe is great - but sometimes there just isn't time to bake before a camping trip. You have a couple of choices: you could buy regular granola bars at the grocery store, or you could buy healthy trail bars.

I like Skout Trailbars. They are made with only healthy organic ingredients, and they are delicious.

Here are the ingredients in my favorite Skout bar variety, Apple Cinnamon:

dates
oats
apples
almonds
blue agave nectar
sunflower oil
cinnamon
sea salt

Compare that list with the ingredients in a typical processed granola bar. I won't name the manufacturer, but it's a well-known brand.

roasted peanuts
high maltose corn syrup
sugar
oats
crisp rice (rice flour, sugar, barley malt extract, salt, monoglycerides, tocopherols, rice extract)
glucose-fructose
palm kernel oil
wheat flakes (wheat, sugar, salt, barley malt extract, tocopherols)
fructose
peanut butter (peanuts, salt)
canola oil
modified milk ingredients
corn starch
salt
partially defatted peanut flour
soy lecithin
natural flavor
peanut oil
almonds
maltodextrin
baking soda
honey
palm oil
rosemary extract
tocopherols