Vegan and gluten free this gingerbread granola makes the perfect healthy topping to your festive breakfast! Sprinkle on porridge, overnight oats, yoghurt and more!

We eat a LOT of oats in this house.  I buy oats by the kilo.  I bake with them, add soaked oats to Nooch’s breakfast and of course the perennial favourite – porridge.  Not just any old porridge.  Nooo.  Thick and creamy made with almond milk, sweetened with nutty maple syrup, spiced with cinnamon, topped with banana and always – ALWAYS – finished off with some kind of homemade granola.  And winter breakfasts get a festive sprinkle of gingerbread granola!

There is genuinely not a single week goes past where there isn’t some flavour or other of granola in our bread bin.  Yes we keep granola in old ice-cream tubs in our bread bin.  We’re classy like that.  There’s this Peanut Butter Granola and of course a Chocolate Orange Granola.  Because the world is just better with more chocolate orange things in it.

Not only is this a healthy granola but it’s also refined sugar free granola!  But what it’s not lacking in is festive flavour.  There’s warming spices, toasted pecan nuts, pops of sweet goji berries, oats and of course those wonderful little quinoa puffs from Hodmedods.  Have you ever tried them?  They’re sorta like rice krispies, only better!  They have a wonderful crunchy texture and nutty, every so slightly sweet taste and give this granola a real lift with their extra crunch!

If you’ve not heard of Hodmedods before I urge you to grab a cup of something and have a good look round their website.  They work with wonderful British farmers to source and produce a range of pulses and grains.  They’re particularly interested in searching out less well-known foods, like the fava bean – grown in Britain since the Iron Age but now almost forgotten – and black badger peas.  I’ve been lucky enough to try quite a few of their ingredients recently and I’m a total believer in if you want something to taste the best then you have to use the best ingredients.   And everything I’ve used of theirs is THE BEST.  Hand on heart.  Pinky swear.

Homemade granola is just about the easiest thing to make too.

Simply mix everything together, pop on a tray and bake for 20-25 minutes, stirring once half way through.  If you follow us on Instagram you may have seen in our stories the time I dropped a metal spoon meant to be used to stir the granola with onto the glass door of our oven.  I could have cried.  That was a very expensive granola lesson to learn.

You can also swap out the goji berries for raisins, sultanas or even dried cranberries if you’d prefer.  I just love the festive pop of red the goji berries give it!  And if you can’t get hold of the quinoa puffs you can just omit them.  This granola with all its gingerbread spice is still very delicious!

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