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Just add chocolate, or dates, or banana … 10 delicious flapjack recipes to suit every taste

Sweet, comforting and endlessly flexible, flapjack is the perfect lockdown bake. Whether you’re a vegan, a hipster or a millionaire, we’ve got you covered

Perhaps I am over-generalising, but I feel that the flapjack rarely migrates from the home economics class into everyday adult life. Yet at this moment, it hits all the notes: it is wholesome, very simple, you can bake it with children and you can throw any old nonsense in to no obvious ill effect. Plus, it needs no flour, which is great if you can’t get hold of any, and oats are incredibly good value. There is no kitchen alchemy involving things that have a habit of going wrong – no raising agent, no uncertainty from adding an egg.

I tried every which way, with the “help” of an outrageously careless 10-year-old, to get one wrong, just for the suspense. There were rumours that tin size was important, that the wrong dimensions messed with the texture. It is true that a thinner flapjack will have a more biscuity, less squidgy mouthfeel, but biscuity is still fine, otherwise why would people eat biscuits? It is also true that the finer the oats, the more they hold together in the finished product, but even jumbo oats didn’t fall apart as I had been led to believe. But if this really worries you, you can make them finer by whizzing them first in a food processor, anyway.

Having said that all flapjacks are equally good, it would be contradictory to claim that these are the 10 best: think of them, rather, as a flapjack for every taste.

The nostalgia flapjack

The Pooh Cook Book, loosely based on the sensibilities of Winnie the Pooh, came out in 1971: if you were born between then and about 1985, it will have provided the building blocks of your first cooking experiences even if you never read it. Trust me, I was there.

Anyway, its flapjack – 50g butter, 50g sugar, 100g oats, one tablespoon of golden syrup, pinch of salt, 160C (140C fan/350F/gas mark 3) for 20 minutes – is basically a ration-book version of the classic recipe (generally, there is more fat than oats), and, with a much smaller yield, that should be enough for two hungry children. That’s what really stands out about recipes written before the 90s, how incredibly small they are.

The perfect flapjack

You want perfection, go to the person whose middle name it is: our own Felicity Cloake identified the two fundamental schools of flapjackery as crunchy or chewy, and comes down, herself, very firmly on the side of crunchy. Much more syrup than sugar in this one, and she’s quite strict on the size of the oats, 50:50 jumbo to rolled, but the main way to assure more crunch is a shallower baking tray in a hotter oven.

The classy flapjack

Baking genius Dan Lepard was unaccountably looking for a way to reduce the fat and sugar content of a flapjack, and discovered that even a small amount of tahini - 75g – had a fudgifying effect on the other ingredients, which reduced the need for both butter and sugar. The ingredients list – featuring dates, walnuts, sesame seeds, honey – means it isn’t for someone looking for something simple, but will be ideal if you want to winnow your weird stockpiles.

The hipster flapjack

Victoria Glass is a terribly talented baker whose technical skills I often find a bit out of my league. Nevertheless, these chocolate flapjacks are terrific, as simple as a regular flapjack, but with a distinctive, considered aesthetic.

The vegan flapjack

There are variations of this recipe all over Instagram, though I have found no reputable chef that would put their name to them: the no-dairy, no-sugar, no-nuffink flapjack. Basically, you take mashed banana and oats of any size in roughly equal quantities; before you mix them, toast the oats in a frying pan with enough coconut oil to coat, then add the banana and some kind of nut or seed butter (or more coconut oil, if you’re minded).

You can add as much dried fruit as you think it’ll take without falling apart. And these have to be baked in biscuits, rather than squares, because they’re too mouth-drying otherwise, but they work surprisingly well, I think due to the initial toasting of the oats, which brings depth of flavour.

My small and I agreed, though, that they just weren’t sweet enough, and tried again twice with golden syrup and agave. The golden syrup was the best. For a two-banana mix, I added in two tablespoons but feel free to adjust to taste.

The tastes-like-a-shop-made-it flapjack

The industrialised flapjack has a very distinctive texture which, like shop-bought chocolate cake, is incredibly hard to replicate at home. That’s fine if you’re dead proud of your home baking, but not if you actually prefer the shop version. The answer came, unexpectedly, from a recipe shared by Anna Botting (the Sky presenter) on Twitter: condensed milk. She uses the unsweetened version, but I am obsessed with the regular stuff, and can attest, these have a wonderful shop-bought squidge and also taste like condensed milk.

The Scottish flapjack

Not a traditionally Scottish snack, just from the marvellous Scottish Baking by Sue Lawrence: it’s a versatile recipe that basically lets you add anything you happen to have around, raisins, apricots, coconut, flaked almonds, whatever, and is also the only one that uses any flour. Even in a small amount, it makes them a bit more cake-like.

The luxury flapjack

Flapjacks are about as rich as life gets, and yet you can heap richness upon them to create something 10 times richer, but just as delicious. Like this BBC Good Food recipe for chocolate and caramel flapjacks. It’s the kind of maths that only the flapjack truly understands, just as only Jeff Bezos understands why you’d want to be a trillionaire when you’re already a billionaire.

The tropical flapjack

The Birmingham-based, mostly vegan but not inflexibly so Domestic Gothess fancied up the classic recipe here with coconut and ginger, and if you can overcome your inner purist, I have to say, these are the most interesting. The flavour still has a lot of clarity, it just sounds a few more notes.

The nuts-and-seeds flapjack

Almost all recipes that suggest any seeds and nuts will allow for infinite variations; this BBC Good Food one is seeds only. Mainly, this is because you’re not really trying to pick out finer flavour differences between a pumpkin and a sunflower seed, you’re looking for more crunch, more textural variety and the overall impression of a more grownup snack.

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