Vegan flapjack
Another oats-based post! I made vegan flapjack yesterday. I based it on this recipe, more or less, but I'm not sure the changes I made worked. I put more nuts in than this, and I ground the almonds and cashews into small bits in the food processor, which made quite a lot of nut flour, so I decided to leave out the flour. Then I changed my mind and added flaxmeal, figuring it would do for flour-a-like and nutrition. I also put in pumpkin seeds (lots), cinnamon and raisins.
I left out the sugar, cos baking recipes often have soooo much more sugar than they need, and when I was younger flapjack just had three ingredients, oats, butter and syrup, plus whatever flavourings you wanted. Sugar was never one of the ingredients!
I used coconut oil instead of margarine - about 3/4 of the amount since coconut oil is higher in fat. I don't know if I used the same amount of syrup as the recipe - I used all the syrup we had, and after I'd stirred it, it seemed like a consistency that would stick together, so I went for it. It's delicious, but it's very crumbly and isn't stuck together very well.
Clearly it needed either more golden syrup, or I needed to melt some sugar into the fat after all. I don't know if the flour was essential to the sticking together process. Dairy butter definitely makes things stick together better than coconut oil, so I think with vegan flapjack you do need to make it stickier somehow, but I wanted to make it lower GL. Hrrrrrm. I have added nut butter for stickiness in the past, but I found myself unsure how much this actually contributes to holding the thing together once it's baked.
More experimentation required, which is a bit tricky when I didn't measure how much syrup I used this time. But I did it based on vibes/consistency last time, so next time I'll just aim for 'stickier' and see what happens!
I left out the sugar, cos baking recipes often have soooo much more sugar than they need, and when I was younger flapjack just had three ingredients, oats, butter and syrup, plus whatever flavourings you wanted. Sugar was never one of the ingredients!
I used coconut oil instead of margarine - about 3/4 of the amount since coconut oil is higher in fat. I don't know if I used the same amount of syrup as the recipe - I used all the syrup we had, and after I'd stirred it, it seemed like a consistency that would stick together, so I went for it. It's delicious, but it's very crumbly and isn't stuck together very well.
Clearly it needed either more golden syrup, or I needed to melt some sugar into the fat after all. I don't know if the flour was essential to the sticking together process. Dairy butter definitely makes things stick together better than coconut oil, so I think with vegan flapjack you do need to make it stickier somehow, but I wanted to make it lower GL. Hrrrrrm. I have added nut butter for stickiness in the past, but I found myself unsure how much this actually contributes to holding the thing together once it's baked.
More experimentation required, which is a bit tricky when I didn't measure how much syrup I used this time. But I did it based on vibes/consistency last time, so next time I'll just aim for 'stickier' and see what happens!