Monster Mash granola bars

These granola bars are AMAZING!  Let that be number one.

These granola bars were created by mykitchenescapades.com

After such deliciousness your kids will wonder how they ever ate the storebought ones (*Cough Quaker).
Total time from start to in-your-mouth: 30 minutes. (including 20 min in the fridge)

Variations for your family: endless.  Though you might want to resist the kale craze here.

Our versions all began with the basic recipe from My Kitchen Escapades.

Then make changes accordingly:  IMPORTANT: if you are at a high altitude, only boil for 1 min. 45 sec (unless you want crunchy instead of chewy granola bars.  In that case, go with the full 2 min.)

Cranberry Chocolate with Sunflower seeds and Flax.  By far, the white chocolate cranberry recipe is my favorite.  In our version, we just cut out the salt and coconut, and put in about 3 TBS of Sunflower seeds, and 2 tsp of Flax.  A little healthier and so tasty.

Surprisingly this was our second favorite: Date and Pecan bars.  We added in 1/2 cup chopped pecans and 1/2 cup dates to the original recipe, and it was heavenly.  We don't even eat Dates at our house...until now.

This little beauty came in 3rd favorite: Blue Berry Bars.  We added about 1/2 C of dried blueberries, and put the salt into the dry mixture instead of the wet (it seemed to keep a little more potency that way).  They were a delicious mix of sweet and salty fruit.

Finally the one that came in last was our change to the Candy bar recipe.  We added in 1/2 C of the mini M&Ms as well and sunflower seeds instead of pretzles.  We left out the SKOR bar.  Besides the lack of Skor, we missed our chocolate candies sticking to the rest of the granola bar.  They were chewy goodness with chocolate (still so good) but we had to pick the chocolate up out of the pan and put it back on our bars.  

S'more please - Sorry there was no pic. but we ended up sharing these with friends.  They went quickly.  So Delicious!  For these we added in 1/4 cup Graham Square cereal (Golden Grahams),  1/4 C mini marshmallows and 1/4 C mini-chocolate chips.  Omit coconut.

For all of these mix ins be sure to wait until the main mixture cools or your add-ins will melt!  (excluding the date and pecan.   Those won't melt.  You knew that)

Needless to say my 4 kids have downed over 6 batches of these in different varieties.  If you're trying to save money, and be able to make a quick treat in a flash, these are your ticket.

Now I'm off to clean the honey off the counter that my toddler has been playing in as I finish this.  Have a good day!