Kitchen Shed Crunchy Granola

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Home made granola is so easy to make and it’s a healthier option because you avoid unwanted additives and refined sugars … plus it’s so much lighter on the budget. Granola is not just for breakfast either, working well as a snack or a lovely crunchy topping on yoghurt, so much better than a supermarket crunchy topped yoghurt.

This post has been on my to do list for quite some time but to paraprhase the John Lennon lyric, “Life is what happens whilst you’re making other plans”. April flew by with little opportunity to post on my blog as making favours for a family wedding and then preparing for our son’s 30th birthday weekend camp took up most of my time. What a fab birthday weekend, despite the weather, as we made temporary gazebo screens and guttering to keep us dry whilst we over indulged. Nothing beats sharing meals with family and friends and it feels so quiet now everyone has gone home. All our meals were all eaten alfresco as there’s not enough room in the Kitchen Shed to seat twelve – don’t you think food tastes so much better outdoors ? Catering needed to be simple so evening meals consisted of a curry night, a Mexican night and a BBQ. Breakfast was the option of ready to bake croissants served with homemade jams or our Thick & Creamy Yoghurt, Kitchen Shed Crunchy Granola and fresh strawberries. I was surprised to see the granola and yoghurt were more popular than the croissants and requests for the granola recipe prompted me to get organised with this post.

I don’t know about you but I prefer to make a large batch of granola. Stored in sealed glass containers or jars, granola will keep for at least four to six weeks – we go through about a jar a week so a batch lasts us for a month or so. This recipe is a basic granola mix to which you can add any dried fruits, nuts or fresh fruit you wish when you serve – this works really well if you have people with different tastes or a nut allergy. Feel free to adapt the recipe as you wish but just keep to the same quantities as these correspond to the baking time. The granola is naturally sweetened with honey but I add some muscavado sugar too as OH does have a sweet tooth. We love wheat germ in our granola, it has a lovely nutty taste and it’s extremely good for you, but you could substitute this with more rolled oats or other grains. We ‘spice’ our granola with homemade vanilla extract but if you fancy a bit more spice why not try cinnamon or ginger ? There are so many possibilities, I’ll leave it up to you.

Kitchen Shed Crunchy Granola

Makes:

• 4 litres

Ingredients

• 300 ml water
• 300 ml rapeseed oil
• 300 ml honey
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 kg rolled oats (not instant)
• 500 g wheatgerm
• 100 g pumpkin seeds
• 200 g sunflower seeds
• 150 g golden linseed
• 150 g muscovado sugar

Preheat oven:

• 150℃ / 300℉ / Gas Mark 2

Grease:

• 2 x large shallow roasting trays lined with baking paper

• Whisk together the water, rapeseed oil, honey and vanilla extract. You may need to warm the honey if it’s not very runny.
• Combine the rest of the ingredients in a large mixing bowl.
• Add the liquid ingredients to the bowl and mix together with a wooden spoon.
• Make sure the mix is evenly coated and your lumps aren’t too big or they won’t bake evenly.
• Divide the mix between the 2 trays and spread evenly.
• Bake for 1 ½ hours, stirring every 20 minutes to make sure it toasts and browns evenly.
• Switch off the oven and leave the granola to cool in the oven.
• When completely cooled transfer to glass jars and store out of direct sunlight.
• Will keep for 4 to 6 weeks.

I’m entering Kitchen Shed Crunchy Granola into Credit Crunch Munch created by Camilla from Fab Food 4 All & Helen over at Fuss Free Flavours & hosted this month by Lucy over at Baking Queen 74.

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