Tuesdays With Dorie - Granola Grabbers

Another first for me this week with Dorie's Granola Grabbers, courtesy of Michelle of Bad Girls Baking. I'm not much of a store-bought granola person but I've always been fascinated by the customizable factor in homemade granola. You can pretty much add or omit any ingredient you want and as long as you use what you like, you end up with a winning product every time.

So I embarked on my first granola-making experience. Which, by the way, wasn't bad at all. Pretty easy actually! Mix everything together, bake for a little while and voilà! Homemade granola. Now that I had my base ingredient for the cookies, all I needed to decide were my add-ins. I omitted the peanuts as I'm not much of a peanut-in-cookies kind of gal and replaced them with chocolate chips. Of course. Then I decided to use half dried cranberries and half dried blueberries in place of the raisins. Oh, yeah. I soaked them a bit first in some hot water so the cookies wouldn't be dry. I kept the rest pretty much the same: slivered almonds, sweetened coconut, wheat germ (horrible name but delicious all the same). What did I end up with after all the granola making and ingredient switching and mixing and rolling and baking?

The sexiest oatmeal cookies ever! Oh, yes, that's what these are, sexy, upscale, oatmeal cookies. And addictive too. Sexy and addictive. That'd be a good warning label right there! Check out the Tuesdays with Dorie blogroll to see all the other marvelous granola concoctions the other bakers came up with. If you'd like the recipe for the (Sexy and Addictive) Granola Grabbers, check out Michelle's Blog. And here's the granola recipe, which you can adapt to your liking, as I did.


Granola
adapted from The Kitchen Sink

3 1/2 cups rolled oats
3 tablespoons flax seeds
3 tablespoons sesame seeds
1/4 cup sunflower
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup toasted mixed nuts, chopped (I used almonds and pecans)
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup canola oil
4 tablespoon pure maple syrup
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 375. Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil. Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl. Mix well.

Spread the mixture in an even layer on your prepared baking sheet. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes. I like my granola a nice golden brown so I bake it a bit more but check it often if you like it lighter.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool completely, in its pan, on a wire wrack. Once the granola is cool, you can mix in up to 2 cups of dried fruit. Omit the fruit if you want to make the Granola Grabbers though as Dorie's recipe calls for fruitless granola.