Any of you who have ever read, well, almost anything I’ve written about on CliqueClack Food, know I have a minor affinity for chocolate; I just like it a little bit. But you also know that putting healthy food into my body is really important to me. How do I make peace with my chocolate addiction?
I only eat dark chocolate, because it really does have health benefits. The dark chocolate has a lot less sugar and if you get the grain-sweetened, you’re getting no refined sugar at all. There’s also tons of organic chocolate out there (Green & Blacks being one of my favorite).
When I bake with chocolate, aside from using the grain-sweetened chocolate chips, I make sure the rest of the recipe is full of healthy ingredients. This means sprouted spelt flour, organic Sucanat or blue agave syrup or added vegetables.
No, you didn’t misread that last sentence. You can add vegetables to your baked goods without most people ever knowing. C’mon, it’s not that outrageous; Jessica Seinfeld made it popular and now all the cool kids are doing it. But I was doing it even before the famous Jessica.
My first foray into brownies with vegetables was way back when I stopped eating wheat. A recipe for black bean brownies was shared on a Yahoo group I belonged to, and the rest was history. Even the plebeians, the ones who would buy the junk I baked for the bake sale, would scarf down these brownies by the handful and never think twice about what might be making them so rich and moist. The recipe that I use is not to be found anywhere online, but it’s very similar to the black bean brownies on 101 Cookbooks. I’ve never tried it with agave syrup, though; I just use sucanat.
Get on the Jessica Seinfeld bandwagon and toss some veggie puree into your brownies — carrot and spinach puree to be exact. It would be a fun test to see if your family would know. Apparently those little Seinfeld kids were born without taste buds … only kidding. I honestly haven’t tried these but they are definitely on my list.
These beet root brownies were actually the inspiration for this article, as I stumbled upon the recipe while searching for a photo to accompany my “Dark chocolate brownies that stand up to spelt flour” post. I can really see the sweetness and earthiness of the beets complementing the rich chocolate perfectly.
Tell the truth — what healthy things have you snuck into your brownies?
Clacked by Debbie McDuffee
on Jul 09, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
