Our recent January 27th meeting had both beavers and cubs experimenting with different ingredients to create our own custom energy balls, granola bars, and trail mixes.
Take a look at our meeting plan and recipe below - this could be helpful for planning your own activity at home, planning a similar Scouting meeting safely as a guideline, or just to have the recipe readily accessible with some substitution ideas.
These are some of the ingredients we used - customized for our group's specific allergens, but there are lots of substitutions you can use for even more customized approach.
Seventh Collingwood Scouts' Energy Balls
Dry Ingredients
- Rolled Oats
- Puffed Rice
- Blanched Sliced Almonds
- Raw Pumpkin Seeds
- Flax Seeds
- Sunflower Seeds
- Shred Coconut
- Chunked or Ground Hazelnuts
- Dried Mango
- Dried Cranberries
- Dried Raisins
- Chocolate chips
- Spice Mix - cinnamon, nutmeg, with a bit of salt for electrolytes lost from sweat on our adventures
Wet Ingredients
- Wow Butter (peanut friendly for our meeting), Sunflower or Peanut butter works great too!
- Maple Syrup
- Honey
- Sesame Oil - a couple drops at the end of mixing will help the sticky stuff stick to itself and less to our fingers. Try Vegetable or olive as a substitute for less potent flavour.
Meeting Plan
We spent some time identifying each ingredient, and our favorites and familiarity with them. We also talked about what each ingredient was good at - carbohydrates provide medium to slow release energy, fruits and sugars provide quick release energy and proteins are great for recovery to help promote a good mix of ingredients in our custom mixes. We also touched on nutrients found in many of those ingredients.
Youth were provided a small ziplock bag, and then lined up like a buffet to choose only the ingredients they wanted for the perfectly customized granola bar or energy ball. Once all the ingredients were in the bag, they spent some time mixing them from the outside of the bag to keep their hands clean. If you're making this at home, or everyone is agreeing on the same ingredients, you could do this in a large mixing bowl instead.
We talked about how long these can last after we make them - and as a rough guideline, you can take the expiry or best before date of the soonest expiring ingredient, and use that for the whole batch. Similarly, if no ingredients need storage in the fridge - this wont either - but if we have just one ingredient that needs to be refrigerated, then the whole batch does. You can always keep in the fridge or freezer in a well sealed container to extend lifespan.
Wet ingredients can be left out to make more of a dry granola - perfect to add to yogurt for breakfast.
When planning; to estimate portions I added up all the weights of all ingredients, and divided by participating youth to get an estimate grammage we have available. Taking 60g as the average 'nature valley' granola bar individual size, we had at least 120g of ingredients per youth, which allowed for more and less popular ingredients not spoiling the balance or availability.
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