I like to bake. I like to eat sweets, so that is a big reason I like to bake, but when I was single I still baked a lot, I just gave most of it away. (I worked with mostly guys, so it was easy, and fast)
Once we get this vegetarian thing second nature I am going to start to tackle baking vegan style. I am slowly stocking up on alternative baking supplies and trying to use up all the on-sale butter I have hoarded in the freezer.
One thing I have noticed while forever perusing pinterest is that black bean brownies are all the rage. Now I love brownies so I checked out a bunch of the recipes, but they seem to either have coffee in them (ew) or a lot of alternative baking supplies which I don't have. (mostly all those alternatives to sugar). I decided since I love my own brownie recipe I'll just slowly replace one item at a time. Easy right?
Well, first step tonight was to substitute the black beans for the flour. Not a big deal really, unless you are me, and lazy, and trying to mix them up quick before you put your kid to sleep. (so I can pig out on them when she's in bed). The real "problem" was that our food processor is this big Indian "mix-y" my MIL sent my husband from India. It's fantastic and can grind dal (lentils) to powder and chop up curries into chutney like a breeze, but it's big, hard to clean the containers, and because it came from India, also has a 15lb transformer attached to it. Needless to say it's a job in itself to drag it out of the closet, so I opted to use the wimpy baby bullet.
The baby bullet is wimpy. (did I say that, cause it's really wimpy. great for things you can mash with a fork, but that's about it.) I ended up having to pour my hot melted chocolate into the black beans to get them to sorta grind because I didn't want to add liquid to the beans as I was using them to replace flour. Because the bullet is so small I had a bunch of different measuring cups half full of black beans ground to various levels of smooth, some being "not smooth at all" and also melted chocolate dripping all over the counter top. All while trying to find the other ingredients and get them into a bowl to mix with my chocolate-y beans. As you can tell, I'm not a set everything out before you bake, but a quick get it in the oven, "oh look I don't have enough eggs, what can I add to make this look like batter", kind of baker.
For your benefit I will force myself to test them now while they are still piping hot. Oh, I'm so kind...Okay, so the outside "crust" is a little chewier, they are a little darker, and the inside a little more mooshy, but they taste pretty good and surprisingly more similar to the regular brownies than I thought. I think next time I could put more beans in to make them less mooshy and not compromise the taste. The recipe called for one cup of flour and I tried for one cup of ground beans, but because it was mixed with the chocolate, I'm not sure how much beans I put in, but I did have left overs from the can. When using ingredients from a can or something in my baking I prefer to use them all up instead of having 1/2 cup of something random in my fridge, so next time I'm going to push it all in and see how they turn out.
As a little bonus, I'll add a link to a cool substitute this for that blog posting I found that I will be using in the future.
http://www.picklee.com/2012/08/01/recipe-substitutions/
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