A Weighty Matter

The finished product: chocolate-frosted flour-less fudge squares.

I don’t really have any dietary restrictions myself, but in the subset of friends I will see tonight, there is, off the top of my head, a nut allergy, a dairy allergy, a gluten intolerance (though not full-blown Celiac), and even a coconut allergy, so coconut oil and the like is out. There might be an actual vegan in the mix, too, but I can’t remember.

Amazingly, this recipe actually fits the bill for everybody, as long as you use dairy-free chocolate chips, certified gluten-free oats and extracts, etc. and so on. It’s also soy-free to boot.

Credit for the recipe goes to Chocolate Covered Katie and her no-flour black bean brownies.

I’m going to go with a semantic change here and call them “frosted fudge squares” instead of “brownies” since they’re going to a crowd that would otherwise expect a normal brownie texture. I’ll be honest, the final product is incredibly dense and fudgey, but not very regular, flour-y brownie-like. They are incredibly rich, more like flour-less chocolate cake — in fact, you could just cook this in a sheet pan and frost it for a birthday.

I made a double-batch of the original recipe, using the maximum amount of recommended sweetener (agave syrup, in my case), organic canola oil instead of coconut oil, and then I used both the recommended stevia packets AND I added another 4 TB of organic light brown sugar. Before the added sugar, it still tasted kind of bean-y and oat-y.

For the frosting, which pretty much unhealth-ifies it but makes it more decadent, I just threw together a five-minute vegan chocolate buttercream:

*1/2 c. Spectrum organic shortening

*1/2 pound organic confectioner’s sugar (use the expressly vegan kind if that matters to you). This works out to about a scant 2 cups

*a couple pinches of salt

*2 tsp GF vanilla extract

*4 tsp butter flavor extract (leave this out if this kind of thing freaks you out; oddly it’s vegan and gluten-free)

*3/4 c. powdered cocoa

*4 TB water

Cream together the liquid ingredients with a mixer set to medium, then slowly add in the powdered ingredients. Beat it all until it it reaches frosting consistency.

I actually almost always use this stuff for buttercream-type frostings for cupcakes and the like, since the humidity in South Florida pretty much instantly kills frosting made with anything other than shortening.

Extreme vegan chocolate buttercream close-up

From the same dinner, this is just food porn. It’s mango upside down cake on the left, mango panda cotta on the right, and grilled starfruit in between. The pink stuff on the right is hibiscus syrup which looked better before I accidentally knocked my plate with my hand. 

Time for a homemade fruit pop (frozen puréed cantaloupe and watermelon) for the evening sweet tooth. I think ice cream and I had a passionate fling but we need a break.

True life: I’ve never had Cold Stone before this.

A couple of dark chocolate squares for the late-night sweet tooth… Funny how when you’ve eaten adequately for the day, stopping at two is entirely possible, hah.

This speaks for itself! I love this local company — they make small-batch ice cream out of locally grown tropical fruits, including many relatively obscure ones like canistel and sapote. Each flavor is made with a really high percentage of fruit pulp and less cream and sugar than usual, so the fat and calories are naturally reduced. Also, the company is owned and run by women, yay.

Unfortunately it’s pretty expensive at the store, so I try to catch them at local festivals and markets so I can get a single-serving cup. It’s more of an occasional special treat that way, anyways. This one was a mango/passionfruit blend.

I made cucumber-melon and melon ice pops earlier just by pureeing cucumber, cantaloupe, and watermelon and freezing it in molds. These are actually fancy frozen swizzle stick molds — tried to find regular Popsicle molds at two grocery stores and a Target with no luck, wtf?

Just some more cake porn…