I’ve been baking for years, and am something of a cook as well. This means I spend a lot of time baking, and cooking, chopping potatoes, measuring flour, etc. I also spend a smaller amount of time reading other people’s recipes, because I’m not that great of a chef to the point of not needing guidance. I rarely do that on my main computer, because I’m usually blogging here, coding, or doing my dual-enrollment classes; I almost always do it on my phone. Dredging through walls of ads, video and normal, with X buttons to sear my phone’s processor, along gulfs of JS to make a 12-year-old script kiddie squeal in pain, and all the while hoping that some of the text will actually load so I know if I’m above or below the recipe. Why, oh why, must they assume we want to pay attention to how much their 12-year-old script kiddie loved eating their brownies? I have the Order of the Stick to be reading, why do I have to listen to their aggrieved rants to the effect that they can’t eat gluten or dairy, being, supposedly, overtaken with Karenovirus or something? (No, I’m not an anti-masker, that statement is sarcastic.) I have no affiliate links designed in mind of making you whimper at various privacy policies, and my attempts at getting ads on my site have always ended in eternal Google 2-week website checking, so here’s an idea: I’ll tell you how to make the sweets before explaining how much my robotics team loved them via emoji to send the proverbial emo-kid into hysterics.
Ok, you didn’t take offense to my Karenovirus quip so severely that you can’t read on, and now you need some ingredients. With the limitations of gluten and dairy freedom already imposed, and being unable to use common (and excellent, I love rice flour) substitutes, we’ve gotta delve deeper into the realms of hardcore libercratic Karenography and use Coconut Flour and Carob Powder. You can use Cacao powder instead of Carob but it’s weak and doesn’t taste good in comparison. You’re also going to need baking soda, but you don’t need baking powder because these are brownies, not Mrs. Soccer Mom Who Spends Her Time Blogging’s oh-so-delightful light-and-fluffy cake mix that tastes like wholly organic cardboard. (Don’t you love all my political jokes? No? Too bad, these brownies don’t come with a way out.) These brownies, like most of my recipes, use maple syrup, so have some on hand. You can also use honey, but it’ll taste terrible and I haven’t balanced it with the ingredients so it’ll probably be entirely terrible as well. Agave nectar or similar probably have a better chance of success, and you can use corn syrup too.
Wait, what? Did I just say corn syrup? Yes. Because anybody with even a basic knowledge of chemistry knows that corn syrup isn’t actually that bad for you until you use gallons of it. You don’t get fat by eating sugar, you get fat by eating too much. Sugar and fats are chemical energy, everything has some or you aren’t getting any actual energy. If your body has sugar/fat in excess, you will store it and it won’t stop being stored until you go into ketosis, a bodily process involving the metabolism of fats. Despite all the dietary controversy and anorexia of the 80s, the way to lose weight really is to balance your intake of chemical energy.
You’ll also need Arrow Root starch/flour/whatever, 2 eggs, salt, coconut milk (1/2 cup), and chocolate chips, but it’s harder to write sarcastic things about them so I won’t bother.
Here be dragons instructions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. You can do it higher or lower, but I’ve only done it on 350. There’s a pretty fair chance it’ll taste terrible if you do it differently, at least your first time, but when have I been one to dispel pedantic and narrow-minded notions of baking law? Seriously, don’t change the temperature. This is a fairly unique batter and there is a very good chance you have never done anything like it and thus don’t know how to modify it, it’s also very temperamental and if you change the factors too extremely without guidance it could definitely ruin the brownies.
Get 3 mixing bowls. 2 can be small (not too small), 1 has to be large. Mix together 3/4 cup of syrup, 1/2 cup coconut milk, and 2 eggs in one of them. If your coconut milk has chunks in it (canned coconut milk does, because the oil congeals at 76 degrees Fahrenheit and unless you got the wrong type, they didn’t alter it with hydrogenated oils), you need to microwave it. You really don’t want to microwave eggs, so do the milk and syrup together, let them cool, THEN add the egg.
In the other small mixing bowl, add 1/4 cup coconut flour and 1/4 cup carob powder (or cacao powder if you don’t have a taste in chocolate), 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, and 1 tablespoon of arrowroot flour. Whisk thoroughly, but don’t bother about being meticulous, this is one part you really don’t have to worry that much about. If you want, you can reduce the coconut flour, but I’ve always done 1/4. Please, I beg of thee, don’t reduce the carob.
Prepare a baking pan. The size doesn’t really doesn’t matter, but if it’s helpful, I usually use 8x8 metal ones and they turn out well. You can use larger ones if you want more thinner brownies, but I don’t recommend doubling the recipe until you reach about double the area. A bit of oil will do as long as it coats the entire thing (I use solid coconut so it doesn’t run down - it works well), but if you want to go the whole selectively bred meat animal you can use baking sheets cut in a stubby plus-sign. The advantages of baking sheets cut in a stubby plus sign is that you’ll be able to remove them from the pan to cut them, instead of cutting them in the pan. The disadvantage is that it’s stupid and wasteful.
Pour 2 cups of chocolate chips (it doesn’t have to be exact, just 1 pack will do if you’re using Enjoy Life chocolates, I can’t speak for other types) into the big mixing bowl and melt them. I do it in a microwave at 10-to-20-second intervals and stirs in between, but if you didn’t pay attention in your science/physics classes and are afraid of microwave radiation, you can do it in an environmentally-inefficient double boiler on the stove. If you opt for a double boiler, all I can say is that a lot of people are going back to college.
Whisk the liquid ingredients again, because by now they’ve almost certainly separated a little bit, and pour them into the chocolate. You might have to use the spatula to help pour it out, it’s purdy viscous. This is the point at which you have to act quickly because if you let the egg sit in there it’ll start to cook, so you need to spatula it fast and until it’s thoroughly combined and then some. Now that you’re kinda safe, pour in the solid ingredients and stir those in well also. This is about the time where you question the recipe and start messing it up because the batter is super runny. Please, don’t do that. It’s not a normal batter and it’s fine.
Pour the batter into the pan. If you did it right, it should be runny enough that you don’t need to smooth it. If it isn’t, you can add some more syrup, but unless it’s so thick you can’t pour it out of the thing, you shouldn’t be too worried. On the other end, unless it’s nearly as runny as the syrup itself, you’re fine. Put it in the oven for 20 minutes, you might need another 3-5 based on the toothpick test. A lot of people think that the toothpick test doesn’t work, how about we just say they’re all of them Joseph R. Biden Dumbocrats.
Let cool until it’s no longer warm, which is the definition of letting it cool. I’m not taking calc yet so please don’t tell me to give you a time. You can put it in the fridge if you want, that works well.
From here you have 2 options: you can try and get the whole thing out, or you can cut it in the pan. If you choose the first one, you’d better hope you used parchment in a stubby plus sign, because if you didn’t you aren’t getting it out in one piece. If you choose the second, just use a very sharp knife to cut it however you want. I don’t take no truck with all that this-recipe-serves-x-people stuff, cut it how you want. If you’re serving it and the people don’t like how it’s cut, tell them to shove it. You have worse things to worry about, such as the fact that you took a recipe from a teenager’s blog.
This one went over really well when I brought it to my robotics team for our lead engineer’s birthday. Some people didn’t much like theirs, and probably just, you know, ate it to be polite, which is OK. These aren’t store-bought High Fructose brownies that taste like garbage and are made of things worse than garbage, these are gourmet. The person that I made them for liked them, so that was a score.
These aren’t the best for parties. I really do suggest that you use somebody else’s recipe if you’re serving more than a couple people because 25-50% of people aren’t gonna like them very much. They’re better for close friends at a rare special occasion than your 12-year-old script kiddie’s roarin’ birthday party. Younger people aren’t going to like them too much, while they are sweet they are definitely not as sugar-saturated as the much cheaper equivalent from Kroger, but more mature people will probably appreciate it. These are great for people like myself who try to stay away from gluten and dairy, and are considered ovo-vegetarian. The egg means it isn’t vegan, unfortunately, but nobody said life was fair.
(I’m not sorry for all the political humor here. This blog isn’t for the faint of heart; read my front page and/or first post if you doubt that.)
My friend's blogs: Wizardwatch's overall site, Sawyer's blog (the .org part bemuses me), Luke's site. If ryleu decides to actually put something on his site, I'll link it here.