Sweet and Salty Trail Mix Bars

Sweet and Salty Trail Mix Bars are a cross between an oatmeal cookie and a granola bar, featuring fun trail mix inspired ingredients like pretzels, chocolate chips, raisins and nuts.

My daughter loves sweets.  Just about every night she asks me or her Dad if she can have "the D word" (code for dessert...so her 2 year old brother won't understand).  And she doesn't wait until after dinner to ask.  It's usually before we even sit down to eat.

The girl plans ahead.  She's pretty serious about her dessert.

We eat sweets in moderation in our house and lately when we want something sweet I've been trying to prepare homemade treats as opposed to buying chocolate donuts, candy bars, or ice cream, which are all my daughter's favorites.  While she'd love it if I did, I don't let her have all the chocolaty sugary stuff every night.  Sometimes it's yogurt, sometimes it's unsweetened applesauce and sometimes (insert my 5-year old's melodramatic sigh of disapproval here) we skip it altogether.

I cut this recipe out of All You magazine and I knew right away that I, for one, would love it.  I am sold on sweet and salty anything.  I usually go for salty snacks so I guess that's why I like my desserts salty, too.

My daughter and her Dad are chocolate lovers, so I added some chocolate chips.  My girl loved that there were pretzels in them, too.  She's loves pretzels and never had them in her dessert, so she thought that was pretty cool.

I knew this would be the perfect recipe to mix it up a little at dessert time for my little lady.  I cut up some of the pieces really small, around one inch by one inch, and tucked them into her lunchbox as a special sweet surprise.  Perfectly sweet, salty and delicious!

Sweet and Salty Trail Mix Bars

   

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups salted pretzels, broken into small pieces
• 2 cups rolled oats (not quick oats)
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 cup chopped nuts (I used almonds)
• 4 tbsps butter
  
• 3/4 cup peanut butter
• 1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.  Butter a 7 x 11 baking dish.  In a large bowl, combine the pretzels, oats, raisins and nuts.
2. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium-high heat.  Add the peanut butter, honey, vanilla, flour and salt; stir until smooth.
3. Pour the butter mixture into the pretzel mixture and stir quickly to thoroughly coat.  
4. Spread the chocolate chips out into the bottom of the baking dish.  Dump the bar mixture over the chocolate chips and use your fingers to press in firmly and evenly.  (After you get the mixture mostly spread out, I've found that pressing a spatula on the mixture works great to even and bumps out.)
5. Bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes.  Cool completely before inverting onto a cutting board and cutting into bars.

Notes

• Source: Adapted from Sweet and Salty Trail Mix Bars in All You magazine.
• Store in an air-tight container at room temperature.