Low-fat Maple Banana Granola

Warm, fresh, sweet granola. A few years ago I was on a quest to re-create the perfect granola: brown sugar cinnamon, dried fruit, and gorgeous clusters of oats, homemade from a B &B my husband and I had stayed in while we were in Gig Harbor. Unfortunately, after attempting multiple recipes I'd found online, each batch I made came out worse than the previous- loose and not enough flavor, or dry, or just kind of boring. My husband just made fun of me, and we were left with way to much granola no one wanted to eat.

The batches I made never really achieved those sweet little clusters, the clumps of oats. In my opinion, it's all about the CLUMPS! And then, out of no-where, and with ridiculous ease, along came this recipe...

CCK Recipes

I am a big fan of trying out recipes from other blogs. Besides something that just looks or sounds really delicious, I'm particularly enticed when something seems really unique, really healthy, and, when I'm lazy, really easy. Chocolate Covered Katie's recipes are pretty much always really easy, and often healthy and unique as well. I wanted to share a few variation successes (and ones that have not been so successful).

Above: I made her Healthy Lemon Squares, but altered by splitting the recipe in thirds and making a lime version (with lime juice and lime zest instead of lemon) and a blueberry version (with about 1/2 cup fresh blueberries for about 1/3 of the recipe). My favorite was definitely the blueberry version (or blueberry-lemon, which I've also made in the past!) Another great variation is to do layers: make half lemon and half lime, and when you are spreading it in the pan, put in the lime first, followed by the lemon, for pretty little layer bars with refreshing zest. Finally, one last variation that works well: the crust calls for coconut oil- you can easily cut back on the amount of oil by using banana. Since I was running low on coconut oil and only had about a teaspoon, I added 1/2 of a medium banana, melted, to the dough, and it worked great!

Read on for more CCK recipes (and variations) I've tried!

Vegan Cream Cheese & Fruit Rolls

Warm, gooey breakfast buns, rolled with vegan cream cheese and fruit. Sound good? They were!
These mini cinnabuns turned fruit & cream cheese rolls use half whole wheat flour, and the dough doesn't require rising time, so they are a snap to throw together on a busy weekend morning!

Vegan Pizza!!!!!!!

Yes, I really used that many exclamation points. But it's Friday Night Pizza Time!!

I guess I didn't realize how much I'd missed pizza. I'm not like a pizza freak or anything, but pretty much everyone loves pizza, right? I realized the other day that it's been nearly a year since I've had a slice. I thought it was high time I changed that, and I'd been really wanting to try my hand at using a pizza stone. So all that led to pizza time!