Friday with Food: Brownies!

Last week I had the opportunity to hear an interview with Danell at Weed 'em and Reap. She was talking about how she lost about 30 lbs by simply cutting out processed food. She said that she gave herself permission to eat whatever she wanted as long as she made it herself from healthy, real food. She said she was making cakes and cookies like crazy for awhile, but the desire for them tapered off. She still makes it if she wants it, but she doesn't want it as often. She made her sweets with whole grain flour and real unprocessed sweeteners. Well, that got me thinking about brownies.

 I have this cookbook that belonged to my grandma.

This is her handwriting on the brownie recipe. This is REALLY GOOD! Ok, so how do I make it better? Whole grain flour, real butter, and coconut sugar and stevia! Ok!
So that is what I did.

I used a mixture of cocoa powder and unsweetened chocolate because that is what I had.

coconut sugar and stevia

Added to the eggs.

Sifting the dry ingredients.

Adding it all together.

Into the pan.

Out of the oven.

It smelled wonderful. It looked wonderful!   It was bitter and very dry!

First lesson: When using whole grain flour, you must increase the amount of shortening that you would normally use. I'm not sure by exactly how much at this point. I think double would probably be too much, so I'm thinking half again what the recipe calls for. If the recipe calls for a half cup, I  would use ¾ cup. I'll let you know how that works.

The issue of bitterness, I first attributed to the possibility of too much stevia, but that really didn't make sense. I'm thinking now that there might have been too much vanilla, because the stevia was vanilla flavored, and then I used the whole amount of vanilla called for in the recipe. I'l have to watch out for that.

So what to do with this pan of very dry brownies? I used them in a bread pudding recipe, this time using honey as the sugar replacement. It was better, but still had that bitter taste that increased with time. Still think it might have been too much vanilla.

Ok, so this experiment didn't turn out so great. I'll just have to take what I've learned and try again.

Have a wonderful weekend, and I”ll see ya Monday!