Homemade Protein Bars

[suited]

I used to make these years ago and decided to make them again last night. What I dislike about store bought bars is the price per calorie/quality of the ingredients. This recipe allows you to control the portion that you eat depending on your goals. It's basically a modified no-bake cookie recipe and tastes very similar.

The proportions below will make quite a large batch, and this **** is dense and very filling, so be warned. It should also be noted that you can modify the ingredients depending on the macro breakdown you desire. In the past I have varied the proportions quite a bit and there doesn't seem to be a way to screw this up, it always comes out good.

-- 4 cups of peanut butter - this is an entire 'normal' sized jar of PB (feel free to use natty PB)
-- 4 cups of oats
-- 12 scoops of protein (I have used chocolate in the past, but used vanilla this time and threw in a bit of chocolate syrup to flavor them)
-- a few tablespoons of honey

Heat the honey and PB until it softens up a bit, then throw all of the ingredients together in a bowl. Put the protein powder in first and cover that up with the rest of the ingredients, otherwise powder will fly when you start to blend it. Use a hand mixer or a mixing bowl to blend everything together. You can do it with a spoon, but it will be rather labor intensive as the mixture is very thick.

Once it is mixed, grab a large baking pan or some other container of your choice and flatten the mix into that pan. Store it in the fridge.

Serving size is up to you and if you are counting calories you will obviously want to cut them into equally sized bars. As I eluded to above, these things don't **** around and are certainly not for everyone - but will benefit those who struggle to meet their calorie goals for the day.

If you broke the above recipe into 15 equally sized bars you would have:

573 calories each
51g protein
71g fat
51g carbs
17g of sugar

That is "a lot" of fat, but good fats, and as I mentioned before you can adjust the ingredients. I think I'm going to cut the peanut butter down to 3.5 or even 3 cups next time, assuming that the other ingredients are still able to be "absorbed" with the decrease in PB. Adding in just a little bit of water or milk should easily solve that problem, though.

Cutting the PB to 3 cups and going with 15 bars would yield:

485 calories each
43g protein
54g fat
46g carbs
14g of sugar

I have not made a batch this large before, so I may be foolish in assuming 15 bars. A more realistic serving size might be 20 or 25 bars. Enjoy.