Cooking Brownies With My Almond Flour!

If you read my last post then you'll know all about my urge to make brownies. I started by making my own almond flour and you can find the method in the blog post here. 
The recipe is from Diana Keulian over at Real Healthy Recipes. Diana is a passionate real-food home cook who aims to make delicious yet nutritious meals, snacks and treats for her family.

This recipe uses almond flour instead of highly processed white flour, raw honey instead of highly processed cane sugar and coconut oil instead of butter. While all of these things are better for your body than the alternatives, you should still remember that they're quite calorie dense and should be treated the same as other snacks. A healthier alternative but it doesn't mean you can eat lots all the time!
You can find the full recipe here.

So lets get started! First gather all your ingredients and preheat the oven to 180C or 350F. I did tweak this recipe a little based on what I had available. I used 85% dark chocolate because it was on special at the shops, dark chocolate is a healthier alternative to milk chocolate as it contains less sugar, but the darker the chocolate the more bitter the brownies will be. I also used a variety of honey that tends to be a little less on the sweet side so I used slightly more to account for that.

Next step, gently melt 1/2 cup coconut oil, 1/3 - 1/2cup honey and 100gm dark chocolate. Of course, when you're in the middle of an Australian summer, the coconut oil and honey should already be liquid enough to skip this step. I just melted them over a low heat on the stove. Then stick them in a bowl and mix them together.

While that's cooling, give two eggs a gentle whisk in a bowl and add 1tbsp of vanilla and 1/4tsp of almond extract. Add that into the rest once it's cooled. You can also grab another bowl and mix 1/2tsp of sea salt in with 3/4cup of almond flour.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix thoroughly. Add half a cup of mini chocolate chips in here as well and mix them through!

Once that's mixed add it to whatever pan or tin you're cooking it in. Diane uses mini cupcake pans but I used a rectangle pan because that's all I have available. Also lightly greased with coconut oil before the batter went in. Smooth it out and stick it in the oven!

Depending on your oven, it should take around 15-25minutes to cook. My oven is a little bit evil and cooks horribly unevenly so I had burnt corners and not quite cooked in the middle. If you have a better oven than me you should have no issues, otherwise know your oven well enough to compensate :)

Once it's done take it out and allow it to cook down completely on the bench. If you don't then they'll fall apart when you try to take them out. Take my work for it, it's what I did ;)

Once it's cooled, or still a bit warm if you're too keen to try them, cut them into small pieces and enjoy :) Stick them in an airtight container in the fridge to retain freshness.

Even though I tweaked a few things and was impatient this recipe produces a beautiful moist, nutty brownie. Next time I'll use dark chocolate that has a lower cocoa percentage as 85% makes it just a tad too bitter for my preference. My oven made it cook unevenly but burnt or slightly undercooked it's still delicious. They're moist enough that you can squeeze them in together if they fall apart too. But I'll also let them cool down completely the next time I make them! It's also easy to adapt and add or change things to create a different flavour. You could add roughly chopped nuts or change the vanilla and almond extracts to different flavours. Next time I think I'll try it with peppermint extract as well, as I love a good choc-mint anything!

The home-made almond flour added a delicious nutty flavour as well as a slightly rough texture. As I spoke about in the almond flour post, I could have continued to grind the flour to make it a much finer texture but I chose not to. That didn't impact this recipe at all, in fact, I think the extra texture was great.

This is definitely a recipe that I will use again and I love that it's also better for you than many other recipes in several ways.I definitely recommend giving it a go and have a look through the rest of Diana's website or like her facebook page for updates on her new recipes and real food healthy eating adventure :)