Coconut and blueberry baked oats for real weekday mornings

Quarter past seven on a school morning and I’ve got one kid who wants toast, one who wants nothing, and a lunch order form due at the office by eight. This is the exact gap that coconut and blueberry baked oats fills in our house. It comes out of the fridge already made, gets a splash of milk and thirty seconds in the microwave, and nobody has to negotiate with anybody before their shoes are on.

I started making a version of this a couple of winters ago after one too many mornings standing over the stove stirring porridge while everyone shouted about hair ties. Baked oats solve the actual problem, which isn’t nutrition, it’s timing.

Why baked oats earn their spot in the Sunday prep line-up

The short version: you mix everything once, bake it once, and eat off it for four or five mornings. Rolled oats and chia seeds bring the fibre, the coconut and banana bring enough natural sweetness that you’re not leaning on sugar, and the eggs hold the whole thing together so it slices like a firm slice rather than falling apart in the pan. The Eat for Health guidelines from the Australian Government put wholegrains and fibre right at the centre of a decent breakfast, and this is one of the few genuinely high-fibre breakfasts my kids will eat without a fight, which counts for something in my book.

It’s also just sensible with a Saturday morning netball schedule. I coach the under-11s at the courts off Turton Road in Broadmeadow, and there is no universe where I’m cooking a hot breakfast before an 8am game. This gets portioned into containers the night before and eaten in the car, which I know isn’t glamorous but it’s honest.

Ingredients

Serves 6, in a 20cm x 20cm baking dish.

• 2 cups (200g) rolled oats
• 2 tablespoons chia seeds
• 1/2 cup (40g) desiccated coconut, plus extra for the top
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 2 ripe bananas, mashed
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups (375ml) milk of your choice (I use full-cream, it bakes better than skim)
• 1/3 cup (80ml) coconut milk
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups (about 200g) fresh or frozen blueberries, plus extra for the top
• Coconut yoghurt, to serve

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C (160°C fan-forced). Grease a 20cm x 20cm baking dish and line the base with baking paper.
2. In a large bowl, combine the rolled oats, chia seeds, desiccated coconut, cinnamon, baking powder and salt.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the mashed banana, eggs, milk, coconut milk, maple syrup and vanilla until smooth.
4. Pour the wet mixture into the dry ingredients and stir until just combined.
5. Fold through the blueberries, reserving a small handful for the top.
6. Pour into the prepared dish, smooth the top, and scatter over the reserved blueberries and a little extra coconut.
7. Bake for 30–35 minutes, until the centre is set and the top is golden. It should still have a slight give, not be dry.
8. Cool in the dish for 10 minutes before slicing into six squares. Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to five days.

To reheat, microwave a square for 30–40 seconds with a splash of milk poured over, which stops it drying out. It also freezes well if you want to get two weeks ahead of yourself, which I rarely manage but always mean to.

The bit that makes this work for fussy eaters

My youngest won’t touch anything with visible lumps of fruit, so I learned to fold most of the blueberries right through the batter rather than dotting them across the top, where they’d get picked out one by one and left in a sad little pile on the plate. Blitzed through, they mostly disappear into the mixture and just tint it purple, which somehow makes it more acceptable. I reckon this is the single most useful trick in the whole recipe, more than any of the fibre numbers.

I’ll admit the first batch I made was too wet in the middle because I didn’t let it sit the full ten minutes before cutting. Give it that rest. It firms up properly and you get clean slices instead of a spoonable mess, which matters when you’re trying to get it into a lunchbox without it becoming soup.

How I serve it after Saturday netball

After training we usually head to the café on Beaumont Street for a coffee while the kids kick a ball around, and I’ll often bring a container of this along rather than buying something from the cabinet. A square with a dollop of coconut yoghurt and a few extra fresh blueberries on top holds up fine at room temperature for an hour or two, which you can’t say for most baked goods with eggs in them.

For lunchboxes, I cut it smaller, about eight pieces instead of six, and pack it next to something savoury like leftover sweet potato and feta breakfast hash so there’s a bit of protein and veg alongside the sweetness. Doubles well for lunchboxes is basically the whole reason this recipe made it into permanent rotation rather than being a one-off Pinterest experiment.

A variation for when blueberries are out of season

Frozen blueberries work just as well as fresh, and honestly in winter that’s mostly what I use, straight from the freezer without thawing. If you want a change, swap the blueberries for roughly chopped stewed apple and a handful of sultanas, which pushes it closer to a bircher-style flavour. Raspberries work too, though they break down more and bleed colour through the batter, which some households find charming and others find alarming. Mine is somewhere in between.

This sits nicely alongside other make-ahead breakfasts I keep in rotation, like the buckwheat and banana pancakes with toasted seeds for weekend mornings when there’s actually time to stand at the stove, or the quinoa breakfast bowl with roasted plums when I want something with a bit more protein for a longer morning. If you’re trying to build out a proper high-fibre pantry rather than just fixing one recipe at a time, our piece on setting up a pantry for healthier weeknights covers the basics I actually keep stocked.

The CSIRO’s dietary guidelines research is pretty clear that most Australian adults and kids fall short on fibre most days, and breakfast is often the easiest meal to fix that in without anyone noticing they’ve been managed. This one gets there without tasting like a fix.

On a Tuesday night I’ll mix this up while the pasta’s on for dinner, bake it once everyone’s in bed, and by Wednesday morning breakfast is basically sorted for the rest of the week. That’s not a small thing when you’ve also got a training run to organise and someone’s missing sock to find.

— Nicole Barnes, Golden Door Living kitchen