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With multiple diabetics in the house, baking requires a bit of creativity. But can we make flapjacks, a household favourite, in our Ninja Foodi Max air fryer?
Our go-to refined sugar alternative is coconut sugar, as it creates a nice and subtle caramel flavour. Of course, this only works in certain bakes… coconut sugar won’t provide the flavour profile you want in a Victoria sponge. It does, however, work really well in chocolate cakes, brownies, certain biscuits, and as we go on to show you, flapjacks.
Coconut sugar flapjacks: Ingredients
- 250g oats
- 125g unsalted butter
- 125g organic coconut sugar
- 2-3 tbsp golden syrup
The BBC Good Food flapjack recipe we adapted contains 125g of light brown sugar. For our flapjack, we swapped light brown sugar for Jarganic organic coconut sugar. We did, however, keep the golden syrup in as the jar of honey in our cupboard was disappointingly empty.
While our alternative recipe isn’t diabetic-friendly, it is helpful for people trying to cut down on refined sugar. If you want to completely remove refined sugar and make it more diabetic-friendly, then you can swap the golden syrup for honey. However, you can buy sugar-free golden syrup – we managed to buy some so we tried it out, making completely sugar-free flapjacks.
To help you calculate the sugar quantities in this bake, we’ve done a quick breakdown: there’s 16g of refined sugar per tablespoon of golden syrup. And after the three tablespoons we used, that’s 48g of refined sugar for the whole flapjack. The BBC recipe serves 12, which means each flapjack square contains 4g of refined sugar.
With your leftover ingredients, you can make our coconut sugar and oat cookies. You might need to go and buy some plain flour and bicarbonate of soda, but chances are you’ve already got those in your cupboards.
Baking
Ingredients measured, combined using an electric whisk, and compacted into the Foodi’s cooking pot with a spoon – it was ready to go. As the cooking pot on the Ninja Foodi Max is so deep, to ensure the flapjack could be removed once baked and cooled, we made sure the pot was lined with baking paper.
The BBC recipe called for 180C in a fan oven for 15 minutes, so we copied that in the Foodi: Bake/Roast mode, then we lowered the starting 200C down to the right temperature.
What was it like?
Crumbly. As with oven flapjacks, they’re crumbly when hot. We left the baked goods in the cooking pot to cool for a further 15 minutes, at which point we hoisted them out by the baking paper and left them to cool completely on the worktop.
After completely cooling, it was time to cut them into portions. As you can see from the pictures, the squares weren’t clean cut, and while the crumbs tasted nice, these wouldn’t be on display in a coffee shop. The edge pieces had a crust on top, yet the pieces closer to the middle were “soggy” as one taste tester handily summed up.
Would I use the Ninja Foodi Max to make low sugar flapjacks again?
Perhaps. Either the recipe will need refining to make a mixture with a better bind, or it would need to be baked for 2-5 more minutes for a firmer finish.
The next day
By the next morning, the flapjacks had firmed up nicely: they were easier to pick up and hold, they held their shape, and were still gooey to eat.
All of the flapjacks were gone before lunchtime.
