April 20: Create a healthy brownie recipe?

(no, they're not "magic" brownies, I don't do that stuff... and yes, I do realize it's 4/20... :P)

Today I baked a ton of sweet potatoes.

 

Since I've never had them before, after dinner I thought it might be nice to try (or create) a healthy sweet potato brownie recipe, but most of the ones I found online still had a cup of butter and just as much sugar. What is the point of using something like sweet potatoes in brownies if you don't lighten the rest up a little? Lee made a joke and said we should go to Sonic, get milkshakes and put a stick of celery in it to call it "healthy". Haha! The man calls it like it is.

Anyway, I found this recipe: Food and Whine: Sweet Potato Brownies. I think the name of the blog is not my favorite, but at least this one is a little healthier. I *loosely* based my recipe on this (to try to make it even better than that one, and/or compensate for ingredients I didn't have). Here is my recipe:

3/8 cup whole wheat flour

1/8 cup all purpose flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2/3 cup mashed sweet potato

1/6 cup white sugar

1/6 cup brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1 individual serving container of unsweetened applesauce

1 egg, lightly beaten

1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 F. Mix first 5 ingredients together. Mix the next 6 ingredients together in a separate bowl. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Fold in chocolate chips.

Pour batter into an 8x8 baking dish sprayed with cooking spray and bake for 20 minutes. Let cool for a while, then enjoy.

Here are the wet ingredients about to be mixed into the dry. I looks a little like baby food on hot cocoa mix.

It looks a lot like normal brownie batter when mixed together.

While I was measuring ingredients, Mindy barked suddenly and made me spill the vanilla. :P

After the brownies went into the oven, I remembered the leftover mashed sweet potato I didn't use!

Salt, pepper and cayenne made it a tasty snack while we waited on the brownies.

When the brownies were done, I cut them and served them with milk.

Lee said, "They're definitely weird, but they're good!" (I accused him of only being nice, but he swears he really likes it.) I didn't like them. They needed to be more cakey in my opinion. I couldn't get past the texture. It was dense, but a bad kind of dense. I guess there are just some things you can't leave out (maybe you can still cut back a little though?) when baking or you'll sacrifice texture, and that's a huge part of sweets. As far as sugar goes, I think a little more would mask the taste of the sweet potato better, so I would probably add that back in. I thought less sugar might equal out to a dark chocolate taste, but it didn't. All in all, I don't think I'll make them again (not even Food and Whine's recipe). It was fun to try, even if I didn't know what I was doing. I still don't, and that's alright, haha!

At least the peanut butter toast I had for lunch was yummy. :)

EDIT: After these brownies were in the fridge for a while, they tasted sweeter and the texture wasn't too bad. I still probably won't make them again, but at least they're not as bad as I thought.