Adventures in home made energy snacks

Back in April I decided I was going to free myself from the tyranny of energy bars.

Not that I don't love energy bars or snacks in general.

In fact my body runs is much happier with a constant stream of balanced calories throughout the day. I seem to have inherited my mother's hypoglycemic tendencies. If I let my blood sugar crash I get very grumpy and start to have physical symptoms: headaches, difficulty concentrating and general fatigue. Over the course of long fall season days I need snackies-lots of them.

Of course I am also really picky about my snacks.
Too much sugar? No good.
Too much saturated fat? No good.
Too much protein? No good.

My perfect snack has a balance of sugar, complex carbohydrates, fat, protein and fiber-plus it tastes good.

My energy bar life has evolved over the years. At first I was a big fan of crunchy Nature's Valley wafers. But they're messy and have a ton of sugar. I moved onto Cliff Bars, which come in a bunch of flavors and are easy to eat on the run. The major mark against cliff bars is that they are a lot calories for their size. In the last year I have moved to the holy trinity of energy bars: Mojo, Odawalla and Nugo. They all have slightly different calorie makeup but they share one thing in common, they are almost impossible to get for less than $1.33 a piece.

If I wasn't going through 150 snacks a month, the price wouldn't a be a problem. In earnest I decided that I would make my own power snacks.

My initial thought was to make granola bars.I actually had a fair bit of success, producing something that tasted really good, was altogether healthy but sadly was very messy and had consistency issues. In general they were just too flaky on the outside, making them a seriously messy ordeal. Plus they were just not done enough for my taste on the inside. After trying to correct both problems by making the bars thinner, and failing, I decided to shelf granola bars.

My grandmother had been making healthy bran/flax muffins for a long time, so I decided to coop and improve that recipe. The ingredients in play:

Skim Milk
Egg Whites
Vanilla
No Sugar Added Apple Sauce
Flax (ground)
Textured Soy Protein (ground)
Bran Flour
Whole Wheat Flour
Splenda
Brown Sugar
Semi Sweet Chocolate Chips
Baking Powder
Chocolate Protein Powder (only sometimes)

A few weeks ago I made batch number 5. They came out so well that no one else got to sample that particular group. In the future if you see some random girl trying to get you to sample her power muffins (after all i am kind of a perfectionist) you'll know it's me.