"Copycat Whenever Bars"

Ever since going gluten-free a few months ago, I have begun a new obsession with two things: almond butter on rice cakes and "Pamela's Whenever Bars". Both are extremely awesome, but one is significantly tougher on the wallet than the other. I have yet to find the bars for less than 5$ a box, with each box only containing 6 very small (what I would call senior citizen-sized!) bars. But OHHH are they ever good! I'm especially fond of the Oatmeal Raisin Walnut flavor. Last week (and 4 years later than when we should have first realized this), my partner and I decided that we have been spending way too much on groceries. Aside from our CSA, we buy almost everything from Trader Joe's or Market of Choice. It is crazy to think of how much we spend. Anyway, long story short, we have decided to make a much more conscious effort to be smarter shoppers. Right away I knew this would mean no more Whenever Bars. This made me sad. Thankfully, I found an AMAZING recipe after doing a quick google search, and will forever be thankful to the author of this blog.

I made a few changes to the recipe (as this was the lemon blueberry version), and instead used:
- almond meal instead of almond flour (this was purely based on what I had available)
- a bit more cinnamon and nutmeg
- no lemon juice
- Earth Balance 'butter' (and yes, it does work!)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar (they tasted sweet enough to me)
- walnut pieces instead of almonds (figured there were enough almonds in the almond meal)
- I did not add raisins to try and make it like the type I buy, because I am trying to limit my sugar intake. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that adding raisins to this recipe would dramatically add to the already present awesomeness.

I made these last night for the first time. Dave (my partner) and I were very excited to find out how they would turn out. I think we both checked in on them a couple times each (during the short 12-15 mins baking time). When I first put the globs of goo onto the cookie sheet, I was a bit worried at how they appeared. It was a bit hard to keep them in any specific shape, and I definitely made them bigger than I should have. There were certainly no senior citizen portion sizes going on in our kitchen!

The recipe says 9-12 minutes, but after 12 minutes, they looked like they needed a bit longer. In total I'm guessing I had them in for about 15-16 minutes. They were getting a nice brown color, but were still pseudo-mushy when I took them out. As soon as they cooled (and by cooled, I mean a safe enough temperature that we could each inhale our first bite without getting severely burned), we both entered food heaven. They turned out much better than I expected them to.

Today I am going to try making them with coconut flakes, vegan chocolate chips, and walnuts. I'll keep you guys posted on how they turn out :)