Food & drink: Recipes

Energy bars

Recipe courtesy of Graeme Blair, Serpentine triathlete

Having recently read Tim Hilton's excellent book on the development of cycling in the Fifties and Sixties I was inspired to follow the old traditions and make my own energy bars.

They were a success and so I thought that I would share the experience.

The book gave me the ingredients but not the recipe. The ingredients were oats, syrup, lard (!), sugar, margarine, cocoa powder, and dried mixed fruit soaked overnight in Guinness.

The nearest thing I could think of containing oats, syrup and sugar were flapjacks so I based my version on a flapjack recipe.

The "blair-version" was as follows:

100g of raisins soaked in Guinness for about 4 hours.
110g light brown sugar
a handful of Ovaltine powder
170g butter melted in the microwave
55g syrup
225g oats

• Heat the oven to 190 degrees and grease a baking tin well
• Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl with a wooden spoon
• Pour in the melted butter
• Drizzle in the syrup. (The easiest way being put the bowl containing the dry mixture on weighting scales and add syrup until the weight increases by 55g)
• Spoon into the baking tin
• Smooth the mixture flat in the tin
• Cook for 30 minutes
• Slice into squares whilst warm
• Allow to cool

The result — well Gordon Ramsey would not be proud but I thought that they were tasty and were moist enough to be palatable. I was out for about 4 hours in the Surrey Hills and existed solely on them without any hunger pangs or stomach problems. My two year old daughter also liked them and kept asking for slices of "daddy's cake".