Yikes! Granola bar prices just keep going up at Aldi. It was time to leave those grab and go snacks on the grocery store shelves and make our own. Like just about everything I do in the kitchen we did this big time. At last count we made a total of 80+ bars and one bowl of delicious granola chunks. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Amber and I spent some time on Pinterest looking for granola bar recipes similar to the kind I've been buying. We settled on four recipes, grabbed our coats (and Joe) and headed to the grocery stores for all the ingredients.
I'll share links to each recipe and any changes we made. We doubled all the recipes because we're a lot of people.
5 Ingredient Dark Chocolate Almond & Coconut Homemade KIND Bars {Beaming Baker}
I have to be honest after mixing these up I had my doubts as to how they would turn out. Come on nuts, coconut, salt and maple syrup will some how turn into granola bars??? Yes, some how it happened and they were delicious. They turned out very crunchy, yet chewy in the middle. So good!! These were by far my favorite. However, we did not dip them in chocolate or add the chocolate drizzle - they just didn't need any more sweetness. They also didn't cut well into bars. I think I was only able to get about 6 bars; the rest cracked and crumbled into what we ended up calling granola bites. We gobbled it up in one sitting and I have BIG plans on making this again with other nuts and 85% chocolate bits.
Homemade Granola Bars: No-Bake {Creations by Kara}
Kid friendly describes these to a "T". No nuts, no dried fruit just regular chocolate chip granola bar stuff with flax hidden deep within the peanut butter and brown sugar. Emily and Amber doubled this recipe and pressed it into my Nordic Ware 1/2 sheet pan.
They were very thick and once cooled, set and wrapped made for a very filling snack. The kids ate these up so fast. Next time I really need to "quad" the recipe which would be so easy to do.
Blueberry Vanilla Greek Yogurt Granola Bars {Half Baked Harvest}
These were definitely the most putsy of all the recipes and if we'd made them correctly it would've taken 5 days to be completely finished. My crew doesn't want to wait that long for any food even a super yummy granola bar. So after freezing them down we simply put on the greek yogurt frosting drizzle and didn't do the dipping. I'm sure they would've held together better if dipped, but they still got eaten up. Oh, and I substituted what else, cranberries for half the blueberries.
Homemade Clif Bars {Liv Lives Life}
These were sticky so we packaged them in snack size baggies, then stored in fridge. Maybe because they were in the fridge they didn't get eaten as fast as the others. Nick took complete advantage of that eating nearly every one himself.
How much did we actually save?
Well. Granola bars at Aldi range anywhere from $0.16 each for the basic up to $1.00+ each for the knock-off Clif and Kind bars. Since I added all ingredients and divided by the total number of bars my average price per bar is.......
1 Homemade granola bar = $0.30 or less even with the expensive box of cereal added in.😉
This was really a fun day spent in the kitchen with a number of my kids. It was loud and chaotic, but isn't anything when moms, teens, and littles are involved???
Want a peek into our granola bar escapade check out our YouTube video.
