Our fresh apricot season is short; fortunately dried apricots are easily obtainable and versatile to cook with.
Keeping with the theme of back to school baking, flapjacks are another easy bake you can make with children.
Once the ingredients are weighed, it’s a simple process of melting the sugary wet ingredients together and stirring them into the dry oats and chopped dried fruit. At just 2 years old, my son was an enthusiastic flapjack helper!
Flapjacks are packed with oats and fibre (which for grown ups have beneficial cholesterol reducing properties) and lend themselves to a wide variety of flavour combinations.
Mix things up with this recipe by substituting the 100g of apricots for other dried fruits, nuts and seeds. Chocolate chips work well too.
As well as passing the 21st century lunch healthy lunch box test, a home made flapjack is the perfect home time or mums’ coffee time snack.
Another plus of the humble flapjack is their suitability for bake sales. Flapjacks, like many other tray bakes are easy to bake in bulk, convenient to transport and if necessary, wrap.
Once I baked over 100 flapjacks as an ice breaker to hand out to new bloggers I was meeting at a conference. Three years later people still remark how much they liked them!
Ovens can vary a lot so after 20 minutes’ baking time, check your flapjacks every five minutes until you are satisfied they are perfectly golden brown. Truth be told, I’ve scorched mine a little round the edge today which serves me right for not obeying the call of the kitchen timer. I think I caught them just in time!
Once baked, do be patient before removing them from the tin. If you try get them out before the sugar has set again they will break up.
Flapjacks easily keep for one week in an airtight tin so there’s no obligation to gobble them up in a hurry -although possibly your children will disagree.
Apricot Flapjacks with Ginger
Equipment
- Baking Tray 30 x 23cm lined with non-stick parchment paper.
Ingredients
- 225 g butter
- 225 g demerara sugar
- 75 g golden syrup
- 275 g porridge oats
- 100 g dried apricots chopped
- 15 g stem ginger in syrup finely chopped (or use half tsp powdered ginger)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 160c/Gas Mark 3.
- Melt the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a small saucepan on a low to medium heat.
- Mix the oats, chopped apricots and stem ginger in a large mixing bowl.
- Pour the melted mixture onto the dry ingredients and stir until well incorporated.
- Pour the mixture into your lined tin. Spread to the edges and pack the mix flat with the back of a wooden spoon to compress it a little. This prevents crumbling.
- Bake for 20-30 minutes in the middle of the oven. (see note above).
- Allow the flapjacks to cool in the baking tin before cutting into fingers or squares.
Normal service would soon be resumed I said although “soon” never seems to become “now”.
It’s weeks like the past one where I look around at people who get things done and have full time jobs that I wonder what is the matter with me. Ted is back in school although various errands have kept me away from blogging anything new other than my latest recipe for Babycentre.
This post was called “Be unflappable with flapjacks” and I have indeed being doing my best not to flap about. I won’t go into reasons why but I have been doing my best to slow down and be kind to myself. Life is too short to spend each night writing blog posts until 1am, I have been there and done that. Presently I am enjoying loafing over the re-runs of Downton Abbey prior to the new series starting on Sunday, have spent a weekend away with my husband and I have been planning a trip to Provence in the autumn.
The new kitchen is being eased into – I’m hesitating to publish pictures as not everything has been put back yet and it looks rather empty. “Like an operating theatre” my husband remarked.
Styling food pictures is proving a challenge, most of my props are still packed away and I’ve not mustered up the energy to sort them out yet. Baby steps…
In the meantime, chill out, eat flapjacks!
Very easy to follow recipe instructions.
I recognise all of this, except for the bit about not wanting to photograph your empty kitchen. I would be grabbing the camera to get the shots I could remind myself of when the clutter started to bury me again 😉
Chill out, eat flapjacks. That says it all. Good advice.