Dairy- and Wheat-Free Crispies

When you are trying to avoid dairy and starchy grains, it is very hard to make any sort of granola-style bar. Most recipes require butter to bind all the ingredients together, that could be substituted for margarine but ingesting trans-fats from the margarine would be even worse than the butter. My ingenious 'binding' ingredient is dark chocolate. As dark chocolate has no dairy in it and in small amounts it is actually good for your health due to the anti-oxidants it contains, I would say that these crispies count as a healthy snack - of course limited to 1 or 2 a day and not the entire batch in one go since that would be rather too much sugar!

For my crispies I used organic spelt flakes. Spelt is the original wheat before it was selectively bred and modified into modern day wheat. Spelt has approximately one-third the amount of gluten of regular wheat (according to Judy Coles' The Body Talks) - it is the gluten in bread that makes it so light and fluffy so spelt bread is much denser and heavier. Due to the fact that it contains less gluten, spelt is much easier to digest and according to Coles' research most people who are intolerant to wheat can eat spelt with no problems - a food intolerance is of course not the same as an allergy.

Similar to wheat, oats have also been highly modified over time and for those of us suffering from IBS and trying to follow a low-starch diet they are less easy to digest than spelt or rye. The spelt flakes could be substituted for jumbo oat flakes and in that case I would try to get organic ones. Buckwheat flakes are entirely gluten-free but they are tiny little flakes that I don't imagine would work quite as well as the large spelt or oat flakes - if you can't have gluten then it would be worth giving them a try though.

Putting the crispies together is extremely quick and easy, all you need is:

100g dark chocolate

8 tablespoons spelt flakes

4 tablespoons mixed dried fruit (you can buy packets of ready-mixed raisins, sultanas and cranberries)

11 cupcake holders (you may make a few more or less depending on how chocolate-y you want them)

1. Melt the dark chocolate in a glass bowl over a pan of boiling water, once it's melted then take off the heat.

2. Add the flakes and fruit and mix together.

3. Spoon the mixture into the cupcake holders and put in the fridge to go hard.

Voila! Yummy little treats ready in moments.