My New Favorite Ingredient

Welcome back everyone! Recently I’ve started baking again. I had given up baking bread because the little one and her gluten sensitivity meant that if I made bread, she couldn’t have any. So I’d still have to buy gluten free bread for her, (which was expensive) and it wasn’t even organic. So when I found einkorn wheat and found out that she didn’t have any reaction to it, I got busy baking again. Which led to baking other things…

Like brownies. I love chocolate. I think it should be its own food group. Really, I could give up almost anything, but when I think if I had to give up chocolate, color start to fade right in from of my eyes. Yes, very dramatic, I know! But if I make brownies for me, there are four small people who smell the chocolate and feel very much like me about it. And while three of them could eat regular brownies, the smallest one would look very sad and pitiful if she was the only one who couldn’t have any. Then I would feel very, very guilty, and there’s enough of that going around without me creating it. So, I started looking for gluten free recipes for brownies. The one I chose had one of my other favorite foods made into flour: almonds!

Almond flour is just ground almonds, but it’s made nice and fine to feel like flour. If I tried to grind my almonds, I’d get almond butter, which is delicious, just not what I need for baking. Because there’s no gluten in almond flour (which holds things together and makes them springy), you need a binder to hold things together in place of the gluten, and many recipes use a little arrowroot starch.

The second almond flour recipe I had to try was for cornbread. So yes, I know that you can make cornbread gluten free with just cornmeal, and actually, that the traditional way to make it. I’ve been doing that for awhile so that everyone in the family can have cornbread with their chili. But, I grew up on that sweet cornbread mix in the blue box, and I wanted to see if I could make a cornbread a little softer that the one you get with cornmeal alone. And almond flour gets closer! I didn’t make it as sweet as the one from the blue box, but that’s because I’m trying to do less sugar. Except chocolate of course. (Disclaimer: The one good thing about the chocolate for me is that I only eat dark chocolate, which does have less sugar. And lots of antioxidants. Dark chocolate (70% cacao or greater) is actually superfood because of those antioxidants, which can help prevent heart disease and lower blood pressure. So it’s really good to eat a small amount of dark chocolate!)

Matcha and dark chocolate – two powerhouse antioxidant foods! And so yummy!

So let’s get to the recipes!

Almond Flour Brownies (This recipe comes from One Lovely Life)

Serves: 16 brownies

INGREDIENTS

⅔ cup semi-sweet or dark chocolate chips (I use dairy free chocolate chips)
5 Tbsp coconut oil (can sub butter, avocado oil, vegan butter, ghee)
⅔ cup coconut sugar (can sub white, brown, or maple sugar)
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
⅔ cup blanched almond flour
2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
½ tsp baking soda (if paleo) or baking powder
¼ tsp salt

To mix in:

⅔ cup additional chocolate chips or chopped chocolate (can sub nuts)

INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8×8 baking pan with parchment paper or spray with nonstick spray.

In a small saucepan, gently melt chocolate and oil over low heat until smooth and glossy. (Don’t walk away – I almost burned my chocolate!) Remove from heat and set aside to cool slightly.

In a small bowl, whisk together sugar and eggs until slightly lighter in color and until they pass the ribbon test (when you lift the whisk the mixture should stream down evenly in “ribbons”). Set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients–almond flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt.

Working slowly, whisk the egg/sugar mixture into the saucepan of melted chocolate. Whisk until smooth. Stir in vanilla.

Stir in the dry ingredients and fold until just mixed.

Fold in the additional chocolate chips (I laid mine on top because they were pretty chocolate disks).

Pour batter into your prepared pan and smooth the surface. Bake at 350 degrees 20-24 minutes, or until edges are set and the center is still ever so slightly underdone. (The remaining heat should set the center as it cools)