Fudgy Protein Brownies

Grain-free && Low-fat && Sugar-free

These brownies are kind of amazing, if I do say so myself. They are dense and fudgy, and they hit you in the face with deep chocolatey flavor (far from the cringe-inducing sweetness that hits you in the face with other desserts). The flavor is so intense without being overly sweet, I’ve actually been eating them with berries or other fruits on top or on the side; it’s the perfect desert when you need serious chocolate (see Figure 1 below).

Fig. 1 Fudgy Protein Brownie topped with some fresh Pacific Northwest blackberries.

And best of all, I can actually eat them! That means they’re grain-free, low-fat, and low “sugar”. The trick (in addition to my usual bag of tricks) is that they’re sweetened with erythritol, which is a sugar alcohol; it passes through your body with almost no effect. Just like a neutrino. So it tastes sweet, but has no calories and doesn’t raise your blood sugar (i.e. has no glycemic load). I’ve been reading up on erythritol, of course, to learn more about it and make sure it’s safe, particularly as it seems too good to be true. I will let you do your own research, but it seems like it *is* actually as good as it promises. The only potential ill effects I’ve read about is that in large quantities it can cause temporary stomach upset and digestive trouble because the erythritol molecules reach your intestines without having been broken down; however, in “reasonable quantities” (like when you substitute 1 to 1 for sugar), for most people there’s no trouble. Each of these brownies has just 3/4 of a tablespoon of erythritol, which is less than the amount sugar than you’d find in a regular brownie. I am the last one who would want more digestive trouble in my life, but even I seem to tolerate “reasonable quantities” of erythritol perfectly fine.

To make the deal even sweeter (figuratively, not literally) I’ve added some protein powder into the recipe. High protein, low fat, no glycemic load, tastes like dessert… I’ll be making these on repeat.

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Fudgy Protein Browines

Makes 16 brownies (one 8”x8” pan)

Nutritional Info:

Total: 20.5g fat, 98g protein
Per brownie: 1.3g fat, 6.1g protein

Bits:

Dry

1 cup (120g) chickpea flour
1 cup (90g) cocoa powder (non-alkalized)
¼ cup (4 Tbsp) plain protein powder (I like NorCal Organic Pea Protein Powder)
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 ½ tsp salt
⅛ tsp cloves

Wet

90g egg whites (equivalent of 2 large eggs)
¾ tsp vanilla
¾ tsp hazelnut extract
¾ cup erythritol
425g (1 can) canned pumpkin
1+ Tbsp water

Algorithm

Line an 8” square baking pan with parchment paper. Preheat oven to 350°F.
Sift together dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.
Mix wet ingredients together in a medium mixing bowl; stir until smooth and fully blended.
Pour wet ingredients into dry and stir together with a spatula until fully blended and no dry pockets remain.
Spread batter evenly in bottom of parchment-lined pan. The batter will be thick; smooth with a spatula.
Bake for 30-35 minutes until the middle is firm starts to look dry (a toothpick inserted in the center may not come out clean). Transfer pan to a wire rack and let cool completely before removing and slicing.

Parsnip Date Hazelnut Chickpea Flour Loaf

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Grain-free && Very low fat && Slightly and naturally sweetened

This quick loaf coffee cake is perfect with a cup of tea or coffee. But, parsnips in a coffee cake you may ask? To which I’d reply, sure, it’s no stranger than putting carrots in a cake, which many would argue is much more delicious than strange. Parsnips are just another root vegetable, and they’re even carrot shaped, if that helps to put you more at ease. While maybe not be quite as sweet as carrots, they have a little more of an earthy, and almost creamy, flavor that’s hard to describe; well worth a try. Parsnips really have their heyday in fall when everyone starts to get excited about root vegetables, but like carrots, they seem to be available and delicious year round.

Made with 100% chickpea flour, it’s totally grain-free, and the only fat comes from the chickpea flour. It’s also sweetened only with a little bit of date syrup, making it pretty guilt-free for breakfast, brunch, lunch, tea, or dessert… you might even be able to pass it off as a dinner item; after all, chickpea flour is high in protein and parsnips are a vegetable. I say go for it!

For this loaf I recommend using a store-bought date syrup like The Date Lady‘s, which seems to be have a somewhat greater concentration of sweetness than the home-made stuff I’ve posted about (see my recipe for 110010 Birthday Cake for how to make your own date syrup. As the store-bought kind seems to be darker and a little sweeter, I have my suspicion that after blending the dates and water to make syrup, it’s probably cooked down a little to concentrate it; I need to do an experiment to check my hypothesis, and will be sure to report back when I do. But unless you have time to do the experiment yourself, try to go with store-bought.)

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Parsnip Date Hazelnut Chickpea Flour Loaf

30 minutes prep time, 45-55 minutes bake time

Makes 1 9″x5″ standard-sized loaf

Bits:

Dry:

150 g chickpea flour
1 tsp baking soda
¾ tsp salt
1 ½ tsp pumpkin pie spice
1 tsp ground fenugreek seed

Wet:

200 g grated parsnips (start with about 300 g / 2 large parsnips, then peel and grate to get 200 g)
¼ cup (70g) roasted mashed garnet yam (or butternut squash)
3 Tbsp (50 g) egg whites
½ cup (125 g) nonfat greek yogurt
1 Tbsp nonfat milk
2 Tbsp (40 g) date syrup
1 Tbsp lemon juice
¼ tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp hazelnut extract (or omit and increase vanilla extract to ½ tsp)
¼ tsp almond extract

Algorithm:

Line a 9”x5” standard size loaf pan with parchment paper. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
Combine dry ingredients in medium mixing bowl (sift chickpea flour as it tends to clump).
Grate parsnips, if not already grated, and measure out 200 g. Set aside.
Add wet ingredients except the parsnips in small mixing bowl and stir until pretty much smooth.
Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Fold with rubber spatula until almost combined.
Add the parsnips to the batter and fold until combined.
Bake 45-55 minutes until a toothpick inserted in center comes out *almost* clean. Check after 20 minutes and put a foil hat over the top to prevent dark spots.
Be a boring grown-up and clean up your mess while the loaf bakes.
Let cool in the pan for 15 minutes. Remove the loaf from the pan, unstick the parchment, and let cool completely on a wire rack (best if you can leave it for at least 45 minutes to an hour, if not longer) before wrapping it up and putting it away).

Keeps for 2 weeks tightly wrapped in plastic in the fridge. Also freezes fairly well, but texture may suffer a little.

110010 Birthday Cake

Grain-free && Refined-sugar-free && Soy-free && Dairy-free && Egg-free

(+ Nut-free Option + Vegan Option)

This cake was something I made for a (human) friend’s birthday; she has some stringent dietary restrictions and was lamenting several weeks ago over not having had the simple pleasure of biting into a soft crumbly piece of cake in years. Since her birthday was coming up, I thought I could probably figure out how to make a tasty chocolate cake that fit with her restrictions: no grains (and no chickpea flour!), no soy, no refined sugar, no dairy, and no eggs. Even though the fat content was way too high to be robot-compatible, I knew making up the recipe would be to be a fun challenge for me, and the end result was (I think) a sweet surprise for her.

I made several test cakes before arriving at the recipe below. (Thanks to all my guinea pig taste-testers!) I still want to iterate on this recipe to make it more user friendly… I know that idle cyborgs with an inexplicable penchant for baking even incompatible cakes (*ahem*) are probably the only ones who just happen to have both lentil flour and coconut flour just sitting around in their cupboards. Hopefully recipe simplifications will be forthcoming, but for now it is what it is. I suggest some substitutions for some of the more obscure ingredients in the list below that I suspect will work fine, but they are untested suggestions, as yet. (But then, where’s the fun in baking if there’s no risk?)

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110010 Birthday Cake

Makes one 8″ or 9″ double-layer cake

Bits:

Date Syrup (if not using store bought. Triple recipe and use in place of honey to make cake fully vegan — untested but I think it would work, and sounds tasty.)

200 g pitted dates
1 ½ cups + 1 Tbsp boiling water

Cake Dry Ingredients

320 g lentil flour (substitute chickpea flour if you can eat chickpeas)
80 g coconut flour
80 g hazelnut flour (store bought, or grind whole hazelnuts in a food processor or spice grinder; use 80 g additional coconut flour to make nut-free — untested but I think it’d work.)
96 g (1 cup) non-alkalized (not Dutch-processed) cocoa powder
2 ½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Cake Wet Ingredients

150 g (2/3 cup) coconut oil + extra for greasing
341 g (1 cup) honey
1 can full-fat coconut milk
½ cup date syrup (store bought or homemade from ingredients above)
¼ cup water
2 tsp vanilla extract

Frosting Ingredients (note: I made 2/3 this much to leave the sides of the cake “naked”. Make the below amount if you want to frost the sides.)

144 g (1 ½ cups) cocoa powder
1 cup + 1 Tbsp (2 sticks + 1 Tbsp) Soy-Free Earth Balance vegan butter, softened
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
256 g (3/4 cup) honey
1/4 cup + 2 Tbsp date syrup (store bought or homemade from ingredients above)

Algorithm:

Make the date syrup (if not using store-bought): Bring water to a boil, and pour over pitted dates. Let sit at least 15 minutes. Blend soaked dates with their soaking water, preferably in a high-speed blender, until you have a smooth paste. You should end up with a bit more than a cup.

Cake Prep: While the dates are soaking, grease either two 8″ or two 9″ cake pans with coconut oil. (I baked cakes of both sizes with success; the 8″ version turns out quite tall and is what is pictured above. Next time if I make two layers, I’d probably opt for 9″ rounds.) Preheat the oven to about 325 F. Take the butter for the frosting out of the fridge, if you plan to frost the cake soon after it cools.

Make the Cake: Sift the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Be sure to sift the hazelnut flour, if you’re grinding your own in a food processor or spice grinder.

Melt the coconut oil just to the point that it all becomes liquid, and put it in a medium mixing bowl. Add the remaining cake wet ingredients, and stir to combine. If ingredients don’t combine smoothly when stirring by hand, get out the hand mixer and mix until smooth.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir gently until just combined. Divide the batter evenly between the two greased cake pans. Drop each pan about 50 times from a height of about 3″ above your counter top to get the big air bubbles out of the batter.

Bake the cakes for 40 minutes, give or take a few minutes, rotating once half way through. Cake is done when a toothpick poked into the center just comes out clean (keep a close watch and be careful not to over-bake!). Cool the cakes for 15 minutes in the pans, then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.

Make the frosting: Add frosting ingredients in a deep mixing bowl, and blend with a hand mixer until smooth.

Frost the cake: Frost the top surface of the bottom layer cake and put into the fridge for 15 minutes to set. Remove from fridge, set the remaining cake layer on top, and frost all around. This frosting stiffens up well if cool enough, and would be suitable for piping if you have the piping bags, tips, energy, and inclination.