Amateur Protein Bar Maker

So like the title says, I'm a rookie homemade protein bar maker in training.  On homecooking.about.com I found a tasty recipe for those budget minded protein bar eating fanatics; fair warning though... it's not vegan!  Womp womp!  But don't fret!  It can be morphed into a tasty vegan snack with a few adjustments.  Case in point would be one of the main ingredients: yogurt.  That can be solved with tofu.  On holycowvegan.net there's a helpful list of vegan substitutes for everyday not so vegan ingredients.  I've become intimate friends with tofu and have stock piled some of it in my fridge just for moments like these.

Besides the yogurt dilemma, I came across a few more ingredient issues; I didn't have brown sugar or oat bran available.  For some reason I was of the belief that if you don't have brown sugar at your disposal, then get some good ole plain white sugar and molasses and you're set!  Hmmm, I should've thought about that some more.  After being laughed at by friends about my Paula Dean sugar concoction, I decided to stick with my experiment and made my protein bars borderline diabetic.  The truth is that if you want to make brown sugar, you have to use unrefined white sugar and not the already processed kind.  Lesson for another future day for me.

When it came to the oat bran debacle, I learned that with ome rolled oats, almond milk, banana, flax seed and a blender, you can spin up your own batch for free!  Just beware of how much you need, because you could easily end up with a small pot of oat bran to spare; as much as I love oats, I can only eat so much of it before it sprouts out of my ears.  If you noticed, the recipe asks for chocolate chips,
with alittle bit of effort you can find dairy free chocolate chips that taste just as great as regular ones!

The recipe says that between prepping and baking your bars, it should all take about 30 mins.  Due to all the vegan adjustments and experiments gone wrong, all in all my protein bars took about three hours to make and bake and so far a week to enjoy.  Don't let the amount of time deter you; if you're good with coming up with vegan substitutes on the fly, then you'll probably take far less time than me to make these treats.  I say give em a shot and you won't regret it!