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Heather: Hey guys! This is Heather from healthyveganrecopies.net. Sorry that my kitchen is kind of dark today.
It is a cloudy, rainy gray kind of day outside and on days like this, what I want to do is
make a cup of tea, curl up on the couch with a book, and some brownies. That’s we are
going to make today.
So I hope you guys are excited. Phil is pretty excited for me to make these. I've made them
a bunch of times in a few different varieties or ways, so I will talk about that as I go
through making them. The one that I am going to show you today uses no sugar, no oil. What
we are going to do is work with the natural yummyness of whole foods.
I am going to make things really easy on myself today and do most of this in my food processor,
but it’s totally okay if you don’t have one. This recipe comes together really nicely
just with regular bowl and utensils.
Okay. The base of our brownies is the exciting part. It’s going to be some kidney beans.
You can also use black beans if you like. It depends what you have, what you enjoy,
but basically they are going to have the same texture, neither of them has much flavor,
so they are both going to go really well into our brownies.
So I am going to dump those into my food processor along with, for sweetness, a banana, trying
to get one as ripe as possible. And if you are not using a food processor, what you can
do is use a potato masher or you can use a fork and just mash up those beans and banana.
Now the third ingredient for added sweetness is going to be some fresh dates. These are
Medjool dates; they are the best kind to use. They come with pits in them, so you have to
take the pit out, but that’s really the only downside. They are going to make things
super sweet in here, and this is one part where a food processor is really, really going
to help. So if you are making this without a food processor you might want to go with
the option instead of dates and use some pure maple syrup or some unrefined sugar like coconut
sugar or Sucanat.
Okay. What’s next? Vanilla; okay we are going to add a few more ingredients into the
food processor. The last of which is some natural peanut butter. You want to look for
one that lists just peanuts in the ingredients - no added sugar, no added salt, no added
oils. If you are allergic to peanut butter or you are sensitive or you are making it
for taking to school or something like that, you can just sub this with any other type
of nut or seed butter like almond, cashew, sunflower, and it will get the same texture.
It won’t have quite the same flavor, but that’s okay.
If you want the rest of the details on what else is in here, just head over to my site
healthyveganrecipes.net, I will post the ingredients and amounts right under this video. So just
give that a blend until it’s nice and smooth. So after a couple of minutes, it should be
nice and creamy and smooth.
All right, next into the mix is some baking soda, some baking powder, and some carob or
cocoa powder. If you are curious as to which one is better or which one you might use,
I did a post about that this week; you can check that out on my nutrition site, healthyeatingstartshere.com.
What I like to do is a mix.
So I am going to do half a cup of carob and a quarter cup of cocoa. There we go. Now we
are looking a lot more like brownies, right, it’s looking good.
Okay, the last thing we are going to add in here is some flour. I am going to use some
sorghum flour, which is a gluten-free whole grain, that the wonderful and talented Allyson
Kramer has turned me on to, but you can use any type of whole grain flour you like. The
key is just you don’t want to mix it too much, so I am going to continue doing this
in my food processor, but you can also take this out and just stir it.
Okay, so there is our brownie mix and the very last thing, I am going to add in here
is a little bit or raisins. You can do raisins or dried cranberries or chocolate chips or
a mix. So I am going to part raisins and part chocolate chips, and then I like to line my
brownie dish with parchment paper, so that makes it super easy to take out, cut, and
then clean the dish, but you can also just lightly grease it with some coconut or olive
oil.
Now because when I make brownies and cookies and muffins and that kind of stuff, I try
to reduce the sweetener as much as possible, I find that it’s never a bad idea for me
to taste things before I pop them in the oven, because if they are not sweet enough at this
point, I could add more sweetener if I wanted to, whereas after they are baked, not going
to happen.
I really like it. Some people may want to add a little bit more sweetness to this so
you could add more dates at the beginning or you could add a little bit of maple syrup
at the end, but I really like it. So I hope you guys do too. All you are going to do is
pop these in the oven at 400 degrees and it will take about 20 minutes, maybe 30 depending
on how true your oven is to the actual temperature it’s supposed to be at.
I have also done these on the barbeque, which is a really awesome thing to do in the summer
when you don’t want to heat up your house. It goes faster, because it’s a higher temperature,
it’s like 450 on low, so it takes more or like 20 minutes, maybe 25.
So they have baked and cooled and are ready to get out and cut. You see the beauty of
putting parchment in here is that you can just lift this out and cut like that. If you
have a silicon baking dish, that’s also another good way to do it. Then I am just
going to cut this into 16, but I will just cut one first so you guys can see the inside
how rich and fudgy and deliciously moist it is.
If anything deserves a super close up, it’s that brownie, right? I brought these brownies
to a party once and people didn’t know that I had made them, so they had no inkling that
they were healthy and they certainly didn’t know that they were made with beans, and everyone
was like, ooh, these brownies are really good, who made them, and I got to say, oh, it’s
me! They're made with kidney beans, and everyone looked at me like, really! It was great. It
was fantastic.
Okay. So make the brownies, enjoy them on a rainy day with a cup of tea and a good book
or just whenever you want. They freeze really well, so if you want to, you can cut them
up and put them in little baggies and put them in the freezer, and having a frozen brownie
is pretty nice, or you can heat it up if you want in a toaster oven or something.
Okay. So that is that, go check out the recipe, its right underneath this video. If you are
not on my site, there is a link right there, so go check it out and try out some healthy
brownies for yourself.
Enjoy and I will see you again sometime soon.