Easy Granola

This quick and easy granola makes for a delicious and healthy snack. I’ll confess that it’s probably the first healthy thing I baked since the pandemic began! And while I’ll never regret the delicious cakes that we baked (the recipe for one of them, my eggless almond cake is here), this granola is a great way to get that sweet fix on a more sustainable basis!

I’ve borrowed from a number of different recipes as I’ve figured out the combination of ingredients that works best for us. Toasted walnuts are way better than toasted pistachios in my book. Pumpkin seeds add the perfect crunch, and chia seeds and flax seeds are honestly interchangeable. You’re not going to go wrong by adding a quarter cup of flax seed to the recipe below. I’ve even used steel-cut oats once when we ran out of rolled oats at home, and it was quite good, though it added a slightly different texture to the granola.

The sweetness is what I had to experiment with for a while to get right. A lot of recipes out there call for more sugar, whereas I find “too sweet” breakfast cereals to be a bit of a turnoff. In this recipe, I use a combination of brown sugar and honey. I’m fairly certain you can substitute the brown sugar for equal parts honey, but there’s a taste of caramel that brown sugar lends that I quite enjoy. If you like a chunkier granola, I’d recommend using more honey and less brown sugar since it will help everything stick together more.

My guilty pleasure with this easy granola is to have it with cream. I added a tablespoon of cream (okay okay, two tablespoons, so sue me!) to a quarter cup of granola and it makes for a mouth-watering snack in the early evening. Hope you enjoy this delicious snack!