Granola Bars

I bought this wonderful mini series book "Fun food for children" by Tarla Dalal. I wanted to try something from the book today that is simple to make and for which I have the ingredients at hand. I decided on granola bars as I had some corn flakes lying for more than 6 months, I guess. The granola bars came out very well. Because of some mistakes that I did, there were some small hiccups with the taste. But for those mistakes, it would have been a perfect munchy snack.

Here is the recipe for the granola bars

The book has given the measurements in cup, but since I prefer to measure in gms with my kitchen scale, I first took the ingredietns in a cup(I am yet to check if the cup I have is a standard one) that I have and weighed them in my kitchen scale.

Ingredients to make around 15 pieces

Crushed Cornflakes: 50 gms(I used Kellogs brand and I crushed the corn flakes with fingers)
Quick Rolled Oats: 70 gms(I used Quakers brand Oats)
Dry fruits: around 15 pieces of cashew, 10 pieces of walnuts(can use almonds and pistachios too)
Dried grapes: 1 tbsp
Sugar: 300 gms
Melon seeds: 2 tbsp(I did not use this as I did not have)
Refined oil to grease

Procedure
1. Lightly roast oats, nuts and melon seeds and keep aside to cool.(I roasted all of them together as I mixed them, by mistake, before roasting. Next time I wil roast individually)
2. When cooled, mix together the corn flakes, taosted oats, melon seeds, nuts and dried grapes.
3. In a heavy bottomed pan, add sugar and melt it over gentle heat, stirring continuously till the sugar is light brown in color. This is called caramelization. 
4. Remove from heat, add rest of the ingredients and mix well.
5. Pour this mixture onto a greased marble or stone surface.
6. Using a greased rolling pin, roll out the mixture to form a square.( Even if you are not able to make a square, its OK. The mixture has to be rolled to get the desired thickness for the bars when cut)
7. While it is warm, cut out rectangle bars.

Munchy granola bar is ready.

Note

1. I used the refined oil that was already used for frying papad. Hence the granola bars had a very strong smell of the reused oil. This is a nice lesson learnt for me. I will never reuse the already used oil for greasing. My mother's suggestion is to use ghee instead of oil for greasing which I will follow the next time.
2. I think I heated the sugar a bit more because of which the bars where a bit hard to bite. Correct consitency of the sugar syrup is very important, I guess.

The original recipe was just perfect. If I had not done these two mistakes, the granola bars would have come out really good. I will definitely make these bars again.