Cafe Mocha Power Bars

These trail ready cafe mocha power bars are nutritious, portable and tasty. Good for hiking, lunch boxes, back packs, purses and more. Coffee, chocolate and creamy coconut finish, these cafe mocha power bars are a treat for the trail.

On the road

We’ve been away from home this week. It’s always difficult to be away from the home kitchen with all your curated supplies and trusted ingredients. It’s not practical to bring your entire house with you and it is too much prep to make all those snacks ahead of time and try to keep them fresh.

While on this trip we have been hiking a lot and going through our supply of trail ready snacks. The hikes are beautiful and we have more to hike. I’ve had to make more power bars  and I hadn’t brought anything.

Luckily the local grocery store is reasonably well stocked and I got a few things to make this work.

I always travel with my favourite protein powder. It goes in my smoothie recipe. I used that and some gluten free quick oats as my power bar base. I had plantain on hand to make it sweet and bind it all together. We added hemp hearts, pumpkin seeds for extra protein and flavour, flax meal and chia seeds as more binder and chocolate, espresso and coconut flakes for flavour. Voila power bar mix! 

Making this power bar recipe is very much like making overnight oats. We blended up the plantain with some hemp hearts and pumpkin seeds and the espresso to form the liquid base. At this point you can add any protein powders or green powders for extra nutrients to the liquid base. 

Then we stirred in all the oats, flaxmeal, chia seeds, crushed up raw coconut flakes, more pumpkin seeds and chocolate chips. Our power bar liquid was hot from the espresso so the chocolate melted in, which worked perfectly to blend it all together, flavour wise. 

The power bar mix starts to set up quickly so press it into a square bar pan right away for best results. Press it down to remove air and create a smooth bar.

I refrigerated them overnight to let the power bars set. They need another 12 hours to dry out on the outside, so cut and flip them over. Then store them in the fridge until use.