Raspberry flapjacks with coconut are delicious when made with fresh fruit. Sticky oat square traybakes you’ll want to make again and again!
Sticky squares of oaty deliciousness with fresh fruit
Baking a supply of homemade flapjacks for lunchboxes was a ploy to stop bulk-buying flavoured KitKats from Amazon. Being self-sufficient in homemade flapjacks feels more virtuous. Although given how much butter and sugar goes into a tray of flapjacks, they’re firmly in the treat zone!
These raspberry flapjacks had an extra 50g of coconut to my cinnamon and raisin flapjacks, yet were still highly caramelised.
I may experiment with upping oat ratios to have them chewy but not falling apart. Doubtless, Felicity Cloake will have published her own perfect flapjacks. I could look at her ingredients. But where’s the satisfaction in that?
We buy fresh raspberries all year, but from early June to mid-July we enjoy an ongoing crop of fresh homegrown raspberries from bushes in our garden. If there’s lots of rain, we have quite a race to pick the raspberries fast enough.
As the flapjacks contain fresh raspberries, we might claim they qualify as one of your five a day. Hmm, what do you reckon?
This recipe makes 12-16 raspberry coconut flapjacks, depending on how big you dare eat them.
What can I bake my raspberry flapjacks in?
You need a baking tin with dimensions around 12cm x 30cm. I particularly like this Lakeland non stick traybake tin as it’s deep enough to bake a traybake sponge cake and has notches on the rim to help you cut evenly sized slices.
I would be more cautious choosing current Amazon bestselling Great British Bake Off traybake tin as when I tried this range in the past, the non stick coating came off very easily and their baking sheets twisted out of shape. But it has tall sides without a rim and is a nice teal colour on the outside.
Raspberry Flapjacks with Coconut
Equipment
- 1 baking sheet approximately 9"x12" and lined with non-stick baking parchment
Ingredients
- 225 g butter unsalted
- 225 g demerara sugar
- 75 g golden syrup
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 275 g porridge oats
- 50 g dessicated coconut
- 100 g raspberries fresh
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 180c/Gas Mark 4.
- Melt the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan on a low to medium heat. Turn off the heat and stir in the vanilla extract.225 g butter, 225 g demerara sugar, 75 g golden syrup, 1 tsp vanilla extract
- Mix the oats and coconut in a large mixing bowl.275 g porridge oats, 50 g dessicated coconut
- Pour the melted mixture onto the dry ingredients and stir until well incorporated.100 g raspberries
- Gently stir in all but 6-7 of the fresh raspberries. Mix these in just lightly or else the entire mix will bleed, less appealingly, with pink juice. You’re aiming for gently squished fruit here and there - rather than a single red sock tainting a white load of laundry.
- Pour the mix onto your lined baking tray. Spread to the edges and pack the mix flat with the back of a wooden spoon to compress it a little. This prevents crumbling.
- Push the remaining fresh raspberries onto the surface randomly so they are evenly dotted about.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes in the middle of the oven.
- Allow the flapjacks to cool completely on the baking sheet before cutting into squares or rectangles. (They will crumble if you do it when they're warm).
Notes
Can you freeze raspberries?
Fortunately, raspberries freeze well to use again in baking, jam or smoothies but bear in mind their structure will break down leaving them squashy after defrosting. In these raspberry flapjacks this doesn’t matter as they’re being cooked again. You’d not top a raspberry tart but you could use them in a raspberry trifle.
Alternative fruits to flavour flapjacks if you don’t have a raspberry glut
Raspberries break down with pleasing jamminess when cooked but alternative fresh fruits to cook in flapjacks would be blueberries, blackcurrants or blackberries. Of these, blueberries are the easiest to buy all year round and achieve that similar berry-stained colour.
My previous recipe for blueberry chocolate flapjacks lies in a (somewhat untidy) old post with FIVE flapjack recipes. These were when I baked over one hundred flapjacks, lovingly wrapped them individually, and gave them out as gifts. See also how I used blueberries in my boozy blueberry and cinnamon tart.
Other raspberry recipes to try
Our annual avalanche of fresh raspberries means I’ve used them in lots of my recipes. As well as raspberry flapjacks, a couple of my favourites include Cheat’s Raspberry Tart with Cheat’s Crème Patissière, the even easier Quark Raspberry Eton Mess and the refreshing summer drink, iced raspberry green tea.
