Chocolate Brownies

More baking today - we needed chocolate bad and decided brownies would meet our craving. But I didn't want to deal with melting chocolate so I looked for a recipe that used Cocoa Powder instead. I made these courtesy of Alton Brown with some modifications. Love that there was only 1/2 cup of flour in the recipe but I goofed and only put in 1/4 cup. It's almost like a flourless torte. And we made two 8x8 trays with the batter so we doubled the servings or halved the calories for one brownie but they were not very thick. I also cut the sugar considerably by not packing the brown sugar and only using 1/2 cup of Sucanat instead of a full cup of regular white granulated sugar, this cut the calories too and made it a very chocolatey decadent brownie.

Preheat oven to 300F

Beat together with a whisk:

4 organic large Eggs
1 cup of organic Brown Sugar (not tightly packed)
1/2 cup of Sucanat (this compliments the brown sugar nicely)
Beat this together for 5 minutes until it doubles in size and gets lighter in color.

Melt & Mix together:
1 stick of organic Butter
1/2 cup of Coconut Oil
1 cup of fair trade Cocoa Powder (not dutched)

Once that cools add 2 Teaspoons Vanilla.

Slowly stream the melted butter mixture into the egg mixture with the whisk beating at medium/low (you don't want to get chocolate all over the kitchen!)

Just as the the mixture comes together sprinkle into it:
1/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (I actually used salt flakes from the Murray River in New Zealand) and mix briefly to incorporate or simply fold into the batter.

Pour batter into 2 buttered and floured 8x8 baking dishes or better yet, into one 9x13 baking pan. The recipe said to bake for 45 minutes (mine were done in 40 minutes since I had split the batter up) until almost done (toothpick will come out with some parts sticking to it.) The recipe is particular to cool them in the pan completely before cutting or they may fall apart. Of course we couldn't wait and the picture above are just hot out of the oven - they held together fine and were very moist and flavorful.

Since I had split it into 2 pans, I got 18 (9 per pan) decent size brownies. By cutting back on the sugar and putting the batter into two pans, we decreased the calories considerably but still got the chocolate punch.

These are cloud-like chocolate pillows more than fudgey brownies but still very moist and rich; and the chocolate was spot on. The kids loved them and didn't miss the flour or sugar that was cut out.