I was just shopping and the selection of ready made school snacks outright depressed me. There are shelves and shelves full off “healthy choice” bars, cookies, boxes of stuff that just does not work for us. It either has milk and eggs – both of which often result in itchy rashes for one of the kids. Most of them have ingredient lists 15 lines long containing plenty of trans fats, corn syrup and “natural and other flavorings” – whatever that might be. It is sad that there is hardly anything to buy that is tasty and fits with our diets.

After unloading a car full of groceries I rushed in the kitchen to put something together that the kids and their friends would enjoy while being shuttled from school to sports in the afternoon and that can go in the lunch and snack box tomorrow as well. Hey , if I give the a sugary snack, it can at least try to keep the rest of the ingredients healthy when I have the time.

It smells so nice and is already done !

Here is the recipe :

1 cup unbleached white flour

1 cup fine wholewheat flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/3 cup of sugar

1/3 cup of oil ( I used canola)

1/2 cup of apple sauce – one of these little single portion apple sauce cups

One cup of rice milk – any other grain milk is just fine. If you have run out and your not vegan just mix 3 spoons of yoghurt with water, that works as well.

2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

To cheat with the color I put in a tiny pinch of tumeric otherwise the cake gets very grey from the whole wheat

A good hand full of milk free chocolate baking chips

An this is how you put it all together :

Mix all the dry ingredients well : flour, sugar, baking powder

Mix all the wet ingredients separately : oil, apple sauce, milk (or sub), vanilla extract

Now combine the two mixtures – don’t over process. I find that these cakes do not rise if you mix it too long and too hard.

Then I put in a hand full of chocolate chips. I like it better with blueberries instead of the chocolate, but i did not have any.

I put baking paper in a casserole pan and it came out to about 1 inch high after baking, did not have the patience to scoop it into muffin form.

Baked it for 20 minutes at 375

It is still not cooled down enough to cut properly, but I have to scoop it into containers somehow. It’s time to join the school pickup line soon !