Slight departure from the usual today; I discovered a basic recipe a while ago for flapjacks which had lots of nuts and seeds in them, and have since adapted it with different dried fruits to change the flavour a bit. I’ve made these loads of times recently and they always go down well, and I’ve had several requests for the recipe.

I love this recipe because it’s super easy and quick to make. You can get in from a long week and make the mixture in about 10 minutes ready to bake and take to parkrun the next day. It smells really Christmassy when it’s baking, and I’ve made it more often than I should because of this…! If you forget it’s baking and it singes a bit don’t despair, it’s still tasty unless it’s completely burned. They’re good for fueling the day before a run or especially for re-fueling afterwards (they have a lot of nuts in, bear that in mind if you’re using them pre-run!). Enjoy!

Fruity Power Flapjacks – makes 16

Dry ingredients

• Small banana
• 200g porridge oats (NOT instant porridge, proper oats)
• 100g mixed seeds (toasted ones make a better flavour)
• 50g whole, unblanched almonds
• 50g ready chopped hazlenuts
• Dried fruit of your choosing (I tend to chuck in a bag of chopped apricots and a bag of dried cranberries)

Melted ingredients

• 200g unsalted butter
• 150g light muscovado sugar
• 4 tbsp Golden Syrup (easiest is good old Tate & Lyle in the squeezy bottle)

Method

Pre-heat the oven to about 180 degrees, or a medium heat in a gas oven.

Get a big mixing bowl of the sort your mum and Gran always had and mash the banana in it with a fork first. Be careful and chop it into bits first, or it pings out of the bowl if not completely soft.

Measure out all the other dry ingredients, bung them in the bowl and give them all a good mix with a wooden spoon so they’re nicely integrated.

In a small saucepan, melt the butter, sugar and syrup together. The butter will sit on top of the sugar. Don’t worry about that, it doesn’t matter. Careful not to boil this mixture but if it boils a little bit it gives you a nice toffee smell in the house and still tastes good.

Once it’s all melted pour the hot ingredients into the bowl of dry ingredients and take a couple of minutes to make sure it’s all mixed in well and you don’t have a load of dry oats at the bottom. You want it all well coated.

Take a rectangular traybake tin (a 12×8 or 12×9) and line it with baking paper. Transfer the mixture into the tin and pat it flat with your wooden spoon.

Bake it for just under half an hour, or till it starts to go nice and golden brown.

Once it’s ready, take it out and leave it in the tin for a bit. When partially cooled, get a wooden spatula or something similar and cut it into 16. When completely cooled, carefully lift them out using the baking paper you put in the tin and transfer them to whatever you are going to store them in. I tend to put them in a fresh piece of baking paper and then wrap that in foil.

You can make these gluten free by substituting gluten free oats (Nairn’s are very good and not expensive) and it makes no difference to the taste. You can also make then vegan by using coconut oil instead of butter, but I find them a bit greasy and it takes longer for them to bake – possibly you need less coconut oil than butter….

Totally non technical guesstimate of nutritional value…

From working out the nutritional value of the ingredients and doing a bit of adding and dividing, there are roughly 200 calories, 18g of carbs, 1.5g of protein and 14g of fat per flapjack. This is not in any way exact however and is largely based on allowing me a figure to put into my Fitbit, so it’s just a basic guide.