Energy bar prototype

For the past few classes, we've been researching on the ingredients we should put include, what kind of ingredients would be best for athletes, and so on. This time, we finally put it all together and actually began creating the first prototypes for the energy bar. We hadn't finalised what was actually going to be put into the bar, but we figured we'd just experiment with a few ingredients that we definitely wanted. Guessing that by mixing in mushed bananas would help coagulate the other dry ingredients into one form, we acted on that and it ended up working. After the mixture of two different type of oats, raisins, and the mushed bananas had been baked, it stuck together in its form, just the way we intended it to. While the little sections of the bar had was baking, we melted 2 bars of chocolate to use as a coating. One the chocolate was melted and the baking done, we would dip the little baked balls of oat raisin banana mixture in it. To cool and harden the chocolate coating, we were going to quickly soak it in cold water. We tried that, but it kind of looks wet and disgusting after. The first dip also make the chocolate a bit harder and less liquid, for some reason. (It was probably just because we had been heating it for too long.) We decided stick the portions on a skewer and spread the chocolate over them ourselves. Then we stuck them in the freezer/refrigerator so the chocolate wouldn't be as sticky and soft. 

I don't think we need to change the recipe any much since our little experimentation went pretty well. We did find that the oats we used were too soft, so next time we will probably use granola, which is harder than the oats, but just as healthy. To make the final product look better, we will also try to find crushed almonds to sprinkle over the chocolate coating while it's still sticky. 

Our groups worked very well together because there were certain jobs that required more than one person to complete. Even the simple things like changing the hot water that was used to melt the chocolate or just checking to see if the oat mixture was burning in the oven helped a lot.