Instructions

1. Soften the dates in warm water for ten minutes if they are not sticky to the touch. A hard date will not break down against cashew butter and leaves lumps that hold water.
2. Process the cashew butter, maple syrup, cinnamon, salt, vanilla and dates into one smooth sauce. Any date still in pieces becomes a wet spot in the middle of a finished cluster.
3. Pour the sauce over the nuts, dried fruit and oats and fold rather than stir. Stirring breaks the pecans up, and it is the whole pecan halves that hold a cluster together.
4. Drop the mixture in spoonfuls onto non-stick sheets rather than spreading it as a slab. Baking paper will do if you have no Teflex sheet, but wax paper melts into the mixture and cannot be got off again.
5. The opening stage goes at 63 °C, held for 1 hour, and its job is to set the outside of each cluster so that it stops spreading.
6. Drop the machine to 46 °C for 24 hours, moving the clusters onto mesh as soon as they will lift in one piece. The underside is where they stay wet, and mesh takes hours off the back half of the run.
7. They are done when a cluster holds together under a squeeze, nothing sticks to your fingers, and a bitten oat is crisp rather than chewy. There is a lot of syrup here and it is genuinely hard to overshoot.
8. Cool them spread out before they are stacked. Warm clusters press into one another and set as a single lump.
9. Keep them in a tin at room temperature for a month or the fridge for three. Maple and dates both pull damp out of the air, and a cluster that has gone soft can be crisped again with a short run.