Chocolate Chip Flapjacks: Quick and Easy Recipe

This chocolate chip flapjack recipe is a delicious, indulgent treat. Whilst it contains plenty of nuts and seeds, it is far from a healthy recipe with the focus being on the chocolate. It makes an ideal after school snack for children and goes nicely with a cup of tea or coffee. Better still, chocolate chip flapjacks are super easy to make with no pre-heating of any ingredients required. Simply pile them all into a bowl and mix them up. Using a food mixer is quickest and easiest but if you don’t have one, a mixing bowl and spoon will work just fine.

How to make chocolate chip flapjacks

There are multiple flapjack recipes out there but I really struggled to find a decent one that has the humble chocolate chip as the main ingredient. As a busy mum, I also struggle with the idea of preheating ingredients if it’s not absolutely necessary. Whilst preheating the butter, sugar and golden syrup does make the ingredients easier to mix, it doesn’t add anything to the end result. The sugar dissolves perfectly well during cooking, resulting in a gooey, chewy flapjack.

The one thing I do hate about any recipes that use golden syrup is that it’s such a pain to weigh. I tend to put a small, dishwasher proof bowl on top of my weighing scales, zero the scales with that on and weigh the golden syrup out into the bowl. It’s about 3 loaded dessert spoonfuls if you’d rather avoid using the weighing scales all together.

Chocolate chip flapjack recipe variations

This is a recipe that can easily be varied. I used a mixture of dark chocolate chips and milk chocolate chunks. If you don’t want chocolate chips in it at all, replace them with dried fruit of your choice. Raisins work well, if you are going to use something like apricots, make sure they are cut up into raisin sized pieces. I have listed oats in the ingredients and you can use whatever oats you have available, whether that’s porridge oats, rolled oats or jumbo rolled oats.

If you don’t want to use seeds, double the amount of chopped nuts. Equally, if you’d prefer to avoid nuts then double the amount of seeds instead. To make these flapjacks completely nut and seed free, use 250 grams of oats and leave out the nuts and seeds. The mixed spice and cinnamon are not essential either. I prefer them because I think they add something to the taste but if you don’t have them, don’t worry about it. I’d add an extra couple of tea spoons of nuts, seeds or oats instead. I have listed caster sugar but it’s fine to use brown sugar or granulated sugar instead in the same amounts. It’s all about making something quick and easy that tastes delicious.

The importance of cooling flapjacks

Please don’t feel patronised by me reinforcing the necessity to let these flapjacks cool, I am mainly doing it for my benefit. They do need to cool or they crumble and fall apart when you cut them. But when they first come out of the oven they smell SO good that I just want to eat them immediately. I tend to come to a compromise and cut off a few slices to eat after they’ve finished cooling in the tin, before allowing them to cool completely. At this point they’re quite difficult to eat and exceptionally gooey but there is literally nothing better than warm chocolate chip flapjacks and I can never quite manage to resist.

Equipment

To make chocolate chip flapjacks, you will need:

• Weighing scales
• Food mixer OR mixing bowl and large spoon
• 20cm x 20cm square baking tray or cake tin
• Baking paper
• Oven
• Spatula
• Chopping board
• Knife to cut up the flapjacks
• Lunch boxes for storage

Chocolate chip flapjack ingredients

Basic chocolate chip flapjack ingredients are below. As mentioned above, feel free to swap them around to make them to your taste whilst maintaining the same quantities of wet and dry ingredients.

• Softened or spreadable butter (100 grams)
• Golden Syrup (100 grams)
• Caster Sugar (100 grams)
• Oats (150 grams)
• Mixed seeds (50 grams)
• Chopped nuts (50 grams)
• Chocolate chips (200 grams)
• Mixed spice (1 tsp)
• Cinnamon (1 tsp)

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 180 degrees
• Line a 20cm x 20cm baking tray or cake tin with baking paper
• Weigh out all the ingredients and place into a food mixer or mixing bowl
• Stir until completely combined
• Spread out the mixture into the tin
• Place on the middle shelf of the preheated oven and cook for 20 minutes
• Leave to cool for 20 minutes in the tin then turn it out onto a chopping board
• Leave to cool completely
• Cut into 12 or 16 pieces depending on your size preference
• Store in an airtight container in the fridge