Ian and I went to New Zealand for two weeks in February, and one of the most delicious discoveries was Bumper Bars, a quasi-granola bar/candy bar thing that we pretended was healthy because we were On Holiday.

The apricot-chocolate one was the best, and I’ve been wanting to recreate it since.  So I scoured the internet, found a Real Simple recipe, and made some improvements – i.e. added more chocolate and more apricots.

I made them with the idea that I would take them to work for breakfast, but Ian and I scarfed a third of the pan before they were even cool.  We’re calmed down, sliced them up and put the rest away, but its clear that my vision of a healthy granola breakfast bar hasn’t panned out – they are a victim of their own success.

I’ve been using Smitten Kitchen’s breakfast crumble recipe for a few months now – so much so that the guy at the Turkish International Supermerkert has commented on my plum consumption (he also asked me if I’d been swimming yesterday.  I hadn’t, I was just that sweaty after zumba class). I keep upping the size of the recipe and we keep eating it, and its a really easy way to prepare a week’s worth of breakfasts in one go.

Finally, I got into cacao nibs a few months ago, when I made cacao-banana-coffee muffins, which are delicious.  But the enduring success from the cacao experiment was refrigerator oatmeal, which I have been making several times a week since November – you soak oats overnight with milk, sugar, cacao and fruit.  Since I am less of a dirty hippie than I used to be, I use milk and processed sugar.  I eat it on the train while glaring at people doing their make-up (I mean seriously. I wish women would stop wearing makeup in general, but barring that, I wish they would stop putting it on while sitting next to me on the train).  I’m really sensitive to the smell of it, which makes me sneeze, and watching a woman with an eyelash curler in a public place just grosses me out).

Breakfast!