Sunday, February 15, 2009

Dessert First is Always Better

This is not the aforementioned carrot cake that was promised nor the dinner, but it is close. (To the cake at least...)  I have pictures of the dinner but figured dessert is more exciting, and my friend, whose birthday the carrot cake was for, still hasn't given me the pictures that he took of it.

I realized last week that I had a bag of home-cooked black beans that needed to be used up before they went bad.  I had bookmarked the recipe on have cake, will travel, which involved making brownies with black beans as a base, so I figured that it was time to finally give it a try.  Here is the result:


On their own, the brownies were a little bland and had a healthy taste to them.  I don't think my roommate liked them very much, but I didn't think that they were too bad with raspberries (frozen ones nuked in the microwave) or melted extra chocolate on top.  The healthiness made me not feel as guilty when I ate them once (or twice) a day. Plus, the all the fiber in the beans and oatmeal has other healthy digestion benefits.

I ended up tweaking the recipe Celine posted and making it a hybrid of the two found on her site.  If I make this again sometime soon, I'll probably work on the recipe a little bit more.  Here is what I did:

2 tbsp canola oil
1/4 cup coca powder
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup sugar
1 banana
1/3 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/4 cup oats
1/4 cup applesauce
2 tbsp peanut butter

I used the food processor to grind up the oats, beans, and then mix everything else together.  After putting the batter in a 9x9 baking dish, it was baked at 350 F for 30 minutes.  I think that I may have added a few chocolate chips to the batter, now that I think about it. The fact that I almost forgot probably means that I didn't add near enough.

1 comment:

Jen Treehugger said...

God those raspberries look yummy!
I missed that recipe using Black Beans in Brownies, how awesome. I boiled up a load of Black beans yesterday, I made burgers with mine but I made a double batch and froze what I didn't use. I have so many bags of beans and lentils in my pantry that I'm starting to make my way through using them up.