Search Results for: Brownies

Rich in peanut butter flavor, these super chewy blonde brownies are made without any dairy or grains and they're naturally gluten free.

These incredibly simple, fudgy and chewy brownies are a great rice-free alternative to our classic gluten free peanut butter brownies. They're made with peanut butter, brown sugar, eggs, and finely ground blanched almond flour plus a few optional chocolate chips. 

Baking with nut butter like peanut butter and Nutella

I love baking with nut butter in general, and my favorites tend to be peanut butter and Nutella, the chocolate hazelnut spread. Whenever I publish a recipe that uses peanut butter, I'm asked if you can use Nutella, which is peanut-free.

Whenever I publish a recipe that uses Nutella, I'm asked if you can use another nut butter, like peanut butter. But they're sadly just not interchangeable in that way, but I hadn't figured out quite why—until now. 

Nothing illustrates the difference between baking with peanut butter (or almond butter) and baking with Nutella better than a comparison of this recipe for 4 ingredient peanut butter brownies with our 3 ingredient Nutella brownies. 

Baking with peanut butter

I always bake with “no-stir peanut butter,” which just means that it's the kind that doesn't need to be stirred after opening. It typically has some oil and some sugar added to it, which creates a perfectly blended, emulsified nut butter.

The drippy kind of natural peanut butter, which contains only peanuts and salt, is much trickier to use in baking. But even the less pure, no-stir peanut butter varieties are mostly peanuts (unlike Nutella—scroll down for that discussion).

Peanut butter is a great substitute for flour, often, like in our flourless chocolate peanut butter muffins, which are rich and flavorful, but still have a light and tender crumb like a proper muffin.

Peanut butter is also the base of classic flourless peanut butter cookies, which have no flour of any kind, but still have that crisp outside and chewy inside that some of the best cookies have. They're even made with similar ingredients to these 4 ingredient peanut butter brownies (sugar, eggs, peanut butter, with a bit of baking powder).

The main difference between these other peanut butter recipes and this brownie recipe is the addition here of finely ground, blanched almond flour. It creates that fudgy, chewy texture of the best brownies. 

Baking with Nutella

Nutella has nothing short of a cult following. I had never even heard of it until I spent a semester in Spain when I was in my junior year of college. I saw children eating it spread on toast for breakfast, and was somehow completely confused by it when they explained it to me.

Nutella is a great peanut-free alternative for households where someone is allergic to peanuts. It's not at all the same as peanut butter, though. 

I developed this recipe when, out of curiosity, I tried replacing the Nutella in some of our simplest Nutella recipes, like our 3 ingredient Nutella cookies, with peanut butter 1 for 1. I had a feeling that it wouldn't work, but I had been asked so many times over the years I just had to try it. 

Even though the recipe has no added oil, the natural oils in the peanut butter leaked out during baking and essentially the cookies and brownies fried in their own oil. The result was a greasy, dense and sadly inedible mess. 

Hazelnuts are not that different than peanuts or almonds in baking, so why the dramatic difference? Well, I finally realized that the first ingredient in Nutella is sugar.

Sugar isn't just for sweetening baked goods. It's a tenderizer, too, which is why low-fat baked goods often have so much sugar. So by combining sugar (brown sugar in this recipe) with peanut butter, we're able to mimic the behavior of Nutella in this recipe—and probably in other recipes that are developed with Nutella instead of another nut butter. 

Ingredients and substitutions

Egg-free: There are 3 eggs in this recipe, and the recipe itself only contains 4 essential ingredients. I'm afraid you can't make these egg-free.

Peanuts:  In place of peanut butter, almond or cashew butter would probably work really well (and have a more neutral flavor profile, making these more like blondies than peanut butter brownies). The ingredient list specifies “no-stir” peanut butter, which is the type of peanut butter that is fully integrated the moment you open the jar, with no need to stir. 

Almond flour: Be sure you are using blanched almond flour, not almond meal which is more coarsely ground and made from almonds that still have their skins intact. I like Honeyville brand almond flour or almond flour from nuts.com.

You can actually make this recipe with oat flour in place of almond flour. Just grind certified gluten free old fashioned rolled oats in a blender until a smooth powder forms. I find that a blender works better than a food processor for grinding oats. You could also try using finely ground hazelnut flour.

Chocolate Chips: You can leave out the chocolate chips entirely, or replace them with another type of chip or even chopped nuts. White chocolate chips would be excellent.

Sugar: Swerve brand non-sugar sweeteners makes a brown sugar variety. Swerve and other alternative sugars do tend to be drying to baked goods, so you might need to add a bit of milk or water to reach the desired consistency in the raw batter.

Just 4 ingredients are all it takes to make these brownie mix black bean brownies—5 if you add some chocolate chips! They're incredibly moist, low in fat and have a rich chocolate taste.

Why use a brownie mix?

My second cookbook, Gluten Free on a Shoestring Quick & Easy, has an entire chapter (Chapter 8!) called Make-Your-Own Mixes. I've got a mix for everything from pancakes, cakes, muffins, cookies, and brownies. But for the longest time, and perhaps since I don't remember using mixes growing up, I didn't understand the point of a baking mix.

I mean, why pay a premium for a box with just a few ingredients in it, often little more than flour and baking soda or powder, plus maybe some salt? It doesn't save much if any, time. But then I got it.?

It's not about the time savings. It's about the guarantee of success. Baking mixes hold the key to home-baked good success, without fear of failure. And when you're just trying to get through the day, you don't have time or patience for anything less.

You can have that same level of certainty with my DIY mix recipes, not only because my recipes are carefully formulated and can be made ahead of time in just minutes. You can trust them to work every time because you're going to make them with a digital kitchen scale. It's easier than using volume measurements, and it's precise every time.

But if you don't have a scale, or if you'd just prefer to use a store-bought mix to make these brownie mix black bean brownies, you can! I tried them using King Arthur Flour's Gluten Free Brownie Mix, and the recipe worked.

The King Arthur Flour brownie mix wasn't nearly as good as the version using my DIY mix. But it worked like a charm. I plan to try using a Dunkin Hines gluten free brownie mix, and I'll report back about my results.

No butter, no oil

These brownies aren't flourless like my original black bean brownies. But they're still much better for you than traditional brownies, as they don't have any butter or oil in them at all. They don't need it, thanks to the black beans.

I'm not entirely sure exactly why black beans work in brownies and even cookies, but they seem to pinch hit for butter in this recipe, and for flour in the original black bean brownie recipe.

One of the best things about baking with black beans is not only that they're more healthful than whatever they're substituting for, but they're “free” on Weight Watchers. So if you're interested in Weight Watchers recipes, and you're comfortable using a 1:1 granulated sugar substitute like Swerve (see full instructions below in the Ingredients and Substitutions section), each one of 15 generous brownies would have close to 1 SmartPoint each. ? Adding the optional chocolate chips will increase the point value, though, so go easy on them.

Ingredients and substitutions

If you're using my recipe for homemade brownie mix, you'll not only make better brownies, but you'll have the ability to make additional ingredient substitutions. There aren't many ingredients in the brownie mix (gluten free flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cocoa powder and sugar), but there are a few other substitutions you might like to make.

These black bean brownies are naturally dairy free (if you use dairy-free chocolate chips) and nearly fat-free. If you don't have to be gluten free, I believe the recipe would work with a conventional 17-ounce brownie mix. If your mix has more than 17-ounces, just measure out the 17 ounces you'll need.

Egg-free: Since there's only one egg in this recipe, you should be able to replace it successfully with one “chia egg” (1 tablespoon ground chia seeds + 1 tablespoon lukewarm water, mixed and allowed to gel). The egg really does help the brownies stay together so I wouldn't just eliminate it without a substitute.

Coffee: I love coffee ☕. In fact, I go to bed most nights thinking about the cup I'm going to have as soon as I wake up the next morning. But I also have a really sensitive palate, and I promise you can't taste the coffee in these brownies.

The coffee is there to bring out the flavor of the cocoa, and to help mask any remaining flavor of beans (of which there really is none). However, if you'd like to replace the coffee, you can use any sort of milk you like—or even water. The only thing that will suffer is taste.

Sugar-free: Without all the granulated sugar in these brownies, they would even be super Weight Watchers-friendly. *sigh* You can try replacing the granulated sugar in the brownie mix with either Swerve granulated sugar substitute, or Lankato monkfruit granulated white sugar substitute.

Any granulated sugar substitute will likely have a drying effect, so you might have to add a bit more liquid (coffee or milk) if the batter isn't at all pourable. You can't use a liquid sweetener in place of a granulated one, though, so honey or maple syrup isn't a proper substitute. If you'd like an unrefined sugar, try using coconut palm sugar.

Watch this 1-minute how-to video

Click play ▶ in the photo either below (on mobile) or at the top of the page (on desktop) to watch the short how-to video. See how easy it is, then make your own!