Paleo Cherry Crunch

When I hear people complain about the price of anyone's paleo crunch, I take up for them. Nuts are expensive and so is almond flour. Dried cherries, too, but think of the nutritional value in this awesome recipe. You don't want to eat junk. This recipe will set you up. Now look at the photo and think of eating 3/4 cup of this with organic milk as paleo "cereal." Yeah?  The BEST PART of the photo is that the is lonely HALF of the recipe - I sent the other half home with Meghan.

I put the following ingredients into a huge bowl:


1  1/2 cups macadamia nut pieces
1  1/2 cups almond flour (I like unblanched)
3 cups unsweetened coconut chips
2 cups pecans, broken into pieces ( sometimes I do 1 cup sunflower seeds and 1 cup pumpkin seeds, instead)
2/3 cup walnut pieces
2 TBSP cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
pinch of sea salt
1  1/2 cup dried cherries

I stirred that up so the baking soda was intermixed in all the ingredients.

I put the following ingredients in a small bowl:
1 cup coconut oil, melted
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup local honey ( if you use raw honey, heat it just a bit until liquid)
1 TBSP vanilla
1 TBSP cherry concentrate (optional, but intensifies the cherry flavor in a healthy way)

I whisked the wet ingredients and then stirred them into the dry ones in the huge bowl.

I spread this mixture out on two big heavy-duty cookie sheets. (If you don't have big ones, you may need 3 cookie sheets - you don't want the mixture TOO thick when you spread it out)
I baked them for an hour in a 250 degree oven - yes, 250 - low heat because we are looking for the crunch!
Then I took them out and stirred them and spread them back out and put them back into the oven for another 20-30 minutes.