White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Granola

Hi.

I’m a food blogger, and I’ve never made homemade granola.

Perhaps the most blogged about item aside from quinoa everything, buffalo everything and bang bang shrimp everything, homemade granola is basically a rite of passage for a blogger. Almost every cook or blogger I know has some sort of granola recipe up their sleeve it seems, and while I’ve lusted after countless recipes, I’ve never attempted to make it myself.

I’m not exactly sure what’s stopped me, as I almost always have the pertinent ingredients on hand to quickly whip up a batch, and it’s not like I don’t like the stuff. In fact, I love it. I think maybe I associated it with being high in carbs and sugar – even the homemade variety – so I pushed it aside. It wasn’t until this past weekend when I was visiting Kevin’s family in Richmond that I remembered just how much I adore the subtle sweetness and texture of a bowl of yogurt with granola.

Courtesy of my sister-in-law, almost every morning for breakfast I’d have a big bowl of vanilla Greek yogurt, topped with crunchy granola and sprinkled with hemp seeds – delicious, filling and the perfect way to start my morning. Come Tuesday morning when I was home again, I found myself wanting that exact same thing for breakfast. I already had Greek yogurt on hand, had picked up a package of hemp seed on my grocery store run the day before, but failed to pick up the same granola she had on hand over the weekend.

After a quick perusing session through my pantry, I pulled out all of the necessary ingredients to put together a quick granola. I had planned on doing a pretty straight-forward version, with only oats and almonds, but after I spotted some leftover macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips, I couldn’t resist fancying it up a little bit.

What resulted was pretty much the equivalent of a white chocolate macadamia nut cookie in oatmeal form – in other words, heaven.

A conservative pour of honey, dark brown sugar and coconut oil make up the “sauce” the oats, sliced almonds and chopped macadamia nuts are coated in. All of the ingredients minus the white chocolate are tossed together and thrown into the oven to crisp up at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. Because nuts burn easily and you want the mixture to evenly crisp up, I tossed the mixture every ten minutes or so until it was golden brown.

Once it comes out of the oven, I let it cool just slightly and then sprinkle the white chocolate chips over the top. When the residual heat from the granola melts the chocolate it’s tossed one more time and then cooled completely.

I only made this two days ago and already need to make a new batch since I can’t seem to stop myself from inhaling it any opportunity I get.

Maybe the next batch I’ll share….