Mom's health bars

Hello loves! Sorry it's been so long, in the past two weeks I've gone through finals week and 80 hours of working, but now I'm back to it, I promise! With two weeks of working, I finally got a weekend to go home and see my family, which means lots of love and delicious food. My parents always make the best meals and spoil me with bags of stuff to take back home to Seattle. This time, my mom shared this awesome recipe she found on Popsugar Fitness through Pinterest, and I'm addicted (which means Jason is too). They were a little too healthy for our taste though, so her and I added some chocolate chips!

What you'll need:

1 cup almond butter
2 cups rolled oats
3 oz. vanilla or chocolate protein powder (it's great with both)
1/2 cup pure maple syrup*
2 large eggs
1/2 cup unsweetened coconut
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup mini semi-sweet chocolate chips (optional)

*This is the pure maple syrup (Grade B) my mom uses, it is delicious, not too expensive, and much healthier than regular syrup, find it at Trader Joe's!

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and lightly spray a 9x11 glass baking pan.

2. Grab a small mixing bowl and a mixer, mix together the almond butter, protein powder, and syrup. It should look something like this...

The consistency will be a little chunky.

3. Mix in the eggs. The batter should look something like this...

The batter will become much creamier.

4. Gather rolled oats, coconut, baking soda, and add them to your mixture. We folded these in with a plastic flexible spatula because the mixture became so sticky from the syrup. 

5. Fold in your mini chocolate chips (the batter will not be easy to deal with at this point, it'll take some patience!)

6. Press the batter into the baking pan.

7. Place in the oven for approximately 12 minutes. They're so good fresh out of the oven with the perfectly melted chocolate chips! They're also delicious (and healthier, of course), without the chocolate chips. Enjoy!

For a perfect snack size, cut into 18 pieces.

Are you guys going to give this healthy cookie snack a try? Do you have any yummy healthy recipes you've come across? Thanks for the recipe, mom! xoxo