As we have written before, there has been a death in the family of store-bought cereal. Not only was my Mom horrified by the way we could sit down and eat a whole expensive box in one sitting, but the ingredients of corn syrup and other manufactured sugars were enough to kill them from the grocery shopping list. This is when we started experimenting with our homemade granola, which has been the substitute that has appeased all of us.
But we still miss having options for cereal in the morning and thought that trying homemade chocolate cereal would be a perfect experiment for our breakfast woes.
How to Make Oat Flour
When we found this recipe, we showed it right to our Mom to see if she would approve. But we were pretty confident. These seemed like pretty safe ingredients to us. We even had most of them in the pantry, except for oat flour. With a quick search, we found out that you can easily make oat flour by grinding your raw oats with a food processor.
I am not sure if it was just the oats we were using, but we had a hard time getting our flour to be very fine. It felt like we blended it for a very long time before we gave up and decided it was good enough.
Mixing the Ingredients for the Cereal
After we measured out the oat flour, we added maple syrup, cocoa powder, and almond butter. I suppose we could have used peanut butter, but we did not have any in the house that did not have a lot of added sugar. Maybe we will sneak it in the next time we try this if our Mom isn’t looking.
As the directions instructed, we mixed our ingredients until they came together. For us, it seemed very dry, so we added another tablespoon of maple syrup and that helped it form into a ball.
We Laughed Very Hard at What This Looked Like
Ummmm. Seriously? Mom said we might not want to add this picture to the post as it looked so much like you know what.
We were laughing too hard to keep rolling it out into a log, (see even writing that makes me laugh), so we just started pulling away at the dough and rolling little balls.
Even though we had a friend over to help us, this seemed like it took forever! The hardest part was making them all the same size, and we started to get lazy at the end.
Did we ever introduce my rabbit, Sir Albert Grey? Well, by the time we were done, it looked like he had been sitting on our cookie sheet for the afternoon doing his business.
Final Results of Homemade Chocolate Cereal
After a quick 10 minutes in the oven and about 10 minutes to let the cereal cool, we were so excited to have a bowl of real cereal! These little pellets were very tasty! They were so tasty that they were gone within 5 minutes.
My Mom said that every teenager who sits down and eats an entire box of cereal in one sitting should have to make this cereal. It certainly did make us appreciate our little bowls of breakfast more after spending all of that time making these little balls.
Overall, this was a successful experiment, especially when paired with our homemade yogurt. But we would have to quadruple the recipe if we were going to have our fill. We are big breakfast eaters, so this might need to be an extra side instead of the main dish.
How to Make Homemade Chocolate Cereal for Kids
This is a super healthy and tasty homemade cereal. Just make plenty as kids will gobble it up quickly!
Ingredients
- 2/3 Cups Oat Flour (Above how to make your own.)
- 3-4Tablespoons of Maple Syrup
- 3 and 1/2 Tablespoons of Nut Butter (We used Almond Butter)
- 2 and 1/2 Tablespoons Cocoa Powder
Instructions
- Combine the nut/seed butter and the maple syrup in a bowl and stir with a spoon.
- Add the oat flour and cocoa powder and mix again.
- Then use your hands to shape the mixture into a dough. If it’s too dry, add more maple syrup or nut/seed butter. If it’s too wet, add more oat flour, one teaspoon at a time.
- Preheat the oven to 320 °F and line a large baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat.
- Cut the dough into 4 equal parts. If you can keep from laughing, roll the dough into long ropes and cut into small pieces. If that does not work, just take small pieces from the dough and roll them into small balls with your hands.
- Lay the balls onto your baking sheet.
- Bake for 10 minutes, and then let cool for another 10 minutes.
Notes
Adapted From Ela Vegan