Homemade Larabars

I recently discovered a new blog that is very useful to me called 100 Days of Real Food.  You can read all about her family's journey to eliminate processed foods from their diet.  Essentially, she and I are following the same diet so a lot of her recipes are ready-made for me (though I think I may decrease some of her natural sugar amounts).

I have been wanting to try homemade larabars since I bought dates a month or so ago.  I finally found a recipe on her website I wanted to try that wasn't too complicated.  Of course I made it more complicated, but that's okay.  Now that I've made them I know what to do for next time.  For some reason I was really interested in making the seed only larabars.  So I got my pumpkin and sunflower seeds and got to work toasting them.  Very exciting.

 
So here's where life got complicated.  In general, my food processor is good for nothing so anytime a recipe says, 'use a food processor,' I get out my magic bullet.  Sadly, that did not work for the thickness and stickiness of the dates.  I ended up adding a little too much water so these larabars are pretty sticky.  It just wasn't working for me so I ended up mashing it all together by hand and, really, it wasn't any more difficult than mashing up butter for a cookie recipe.  In fact, next time (as long as I buy fresh dates) I will just mash it myself.  I did add some lemon juice for fun but it wasn't enough because I couldn't taste any lemon. 

Here I have perfectly formed them into a quadrilateral of some sort.

I cut eight little pieces from this larger piece and packaged them in their own wax paper wrap.  These have a little more flavor than store bought larabars...probably because the dates are fresh.  They just taste more fresh than the store bought.  Try it for yourself and see what you think.

*Disclaimer: this recipe only works if you already like larabars.  I wouldn't try it unless you already enjoy dates, which I believe are an acquired taste and consistency.