This recipe was the result of a quest to create crunchy banana flapjacks, having tried several recipes with fresh banana that just didn’t have the texture I was looking for.
The trick is to use banana chips ground down to a coarse, sandy flour. The resulting flapjacks are light and crispy, with no tooth-breaking chunks of banana chip.
Aside from having to grind the chips, these flapjacks couldn’t be any easier to make. They’re gluten free and, of course, vegan.
I’m not going to pretend that banana chips are a health food, although they’re sold in health food shops. They’re fried in oil to make them crispy, so they have quite a high fat content as well as some added sugar. However, that means you can reduce the fat and sugar you add to the recipe. More importantly, it means you can have a banana flapjack that isn’t remotely like solidified porridge.
Grinding the chips is a noisy business, but it means there is a banana flavour throughout. Vanilla, brown sugar and golden syrup contribute to a finished flapack that’s a bit like a banana bread, only crunchy!
crunchy banana flapjacks…
ingredients
- 100 g dried banana chips (crunchy not chewy variety)
- 250 g rolled oats
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 25 g unrefined brown sugar
- 80 g coconut oil (preferably the flavourless kind)
- 20 g cocoa butter (or substitute with another 20 g coconut oil)
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 120 g golden syrup
method
- Set the oven to 180°C/360°F and lightly oil/line the base of a suitable tin. (The pictured flapjacks were baked in a 9″ square tin.)
- Grind the banana chips to a coarse flour. If you are using a small blender/coffee grinder, it might be easier to do this in three or four batches. It doesn’t matter if there is the odd larger piece.
- Place the ground banana chips, oats, baking powder and sugar in a large bowl and mix well to ensure everything’s evenly distributed.
- Melt the coconut oil, cocoa butter and golden syrup together in the microwave. Once the syrup is boiling, remove the mixture from the microwave and whisk or stir it until the last of the cocoa butter has melted.
- Add the vanilla extract to the oil and syrup and then pour this into the dry ingredients, stirring as you go.
- Transfer to the tin and level the mixture out, but don’t press it down too firmly if you’re after a light, crispy flapjack.
- Bake for around 20 minutes, until the top is turning golden brown.
- Mark out squares while the flapjack is hot, then allow to cool completely before cutting.
If you would like to receive e-mail alerts when new recipes are published, please see my contact page.
