Recipe: Power Bars

Healthy cereal bars, power bars, protein bars, etc, etc, are so expensive these days! Well they're either pricey or packed full of things they shouldn't have in them. 
After looking at many a recipe for power balls/protein bars, I decided to come up with one of my own. Its super easy and is choc-a-bloc with goodness. Plus, they taste delicious, so much better than shop bought cereal bars. 
When I started planning this recipe, I was worried about the amount of ingredients and how much they would cost to make because sometimes the hardest part of eating healthy is how much it costs to do so. Some of the ingredients I already had in the kitchen cupboards but the rest I sourced from either Holland & Barrett or ASDA. 

Recipe:
100g Organic Crunchy Peanut Butter
100g Honey
50g Porridge Oats
10g Chia Seeds OR any other small seed.
25g Cocoa Powder
15g Vanilla Protein Powder (optional)
50g Desiccated Coconut
120g Pitted Dates

1. Melt the peanut butter and honey together in a saucepan over a low heat.
2. Chop the pitted dates in to halves and add all the ingredients to a food processor including the peanut butter and honey. 
3. Blitz for a couple of minutes on full speed until the mixture starts to come together.
4. I wanted to make my mixture into bars to take to work. To do this, I lined an 8 inch loaf tin with cling film and pressed the mixture nice and flat then popped it in the fridge to set for 10 minutes. 
If you'd like to make the mixture into balls instead, put the mixture in the fridge for 10 minutes first, then roll into balls and set again for another 10 minutes.
5. After setting, I lifted the mixture from the tin with the cling film and chopped it into 7 bars. One for each day! Perfect. 

I hope you enjoy making these. They are so quick to make and taste so so much better than the supermarket ones, I promise.
A nice treat for those of us having a healthy 2016.
What are your favourite healthy snacks or treats?