Cooking With Kids: Chewy Banana Oat Bars

Difficulty Level: Easy

Don’t buy your granola bars, make them at home with ingredients in your kitchen! These chewy peanut butter banana oat bars are one of our favorite cooking projects to do at Summer Garden Camp. They’re delicious, easy to make, and include simple, wholesome ingredients like grains and healthy fats.

Why We Love These Bars

This is an easy, beginner level baking activity for kids of all ages. It requires one bowl, a few pantry staples, and some ripe bananas. They’re everything we love in a recipe and project: Wholesome ingredients, quick cleanup, and they fill your kitchen with the delicious aromas of bananas, oat and peanut butter. 

The base of these bars is only five ingredients: Bananas, Oats, Peanut Butter, Honey, and a pinch of salt! They are also very versatile. You can make these bars with any kind of nut butter or sweetener. The point of these is to use what you have on hand-so get creative! For an extra crunch to your bars you could also add in nuts, dried fruit, or chocolate chips.

Key Ingredients

Oats: You can use any kind of oats you have on hand. If you are looking for less processed oats, we recommend going with rolled or old-fashioned oats. 

Peanut Butter: Smooth or Crunchy! You can also substitute this ingredient out with any other kind of nut butter. While baking at Summer Garden Camp, we’ve made these bars with all kinds of nut butters–allmond, walnut, macadamia, and nutella. They always turn out delicious! If you or your child has a peanut allergy, chickpea or sunflower butter also works beautifully. 

Sweetener: When making these bars we usually use honey, but you can also use agave, maple syrup or molasses. 

Ripe Bananas: Save those brown bananas! The riper the better. Ripe bananas make for sweeter bars because the starch in the fruit has broken down. 

Recipe

2 ½ cups oats 

2-3 bananas 

¼ cup maple syrup or honey 

½ cup nut butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit 

  1. Mash bananas in bowl 

  2. Add Oats, maple syrup, nut butter, and whatever additional ingredients you like. For the bars pictured below, we added chocolate chips.

  3. Grease 9X9 baking dish or line it with parchment paper and use spatula to distribute batter 

  4. Bake in 20-30 minutes or until a knife comes out clean. 

Optional Additions: 

1 tsp. Cinnamon 

1 tsp. Vanilla Extract 

Nuts 

Dried Fruits i.e. raisins, apricots, or cherries

Chia/Flax Seeds 

Coconut Flakes

Serving and Storing Suggestions

For an extra flair, drizzle some honey or peanut butter on top. Otherwise, these bars are ready to eat! You can enjoy them warm or cut them into bars, put them in a bag, refrigerate them to enjoy with your family all week long. 

By Klari Farzley, The Educational Garden Project