First of all, I’m sorry. I’ve been really bad with baking updates the last couple of weeks. While I hope you all enjoyed my Scotland updates (you can see part 1, part 2 and part 3 here), I understand that they aren’t what you likely come to this blog for. I am warning you now that there will likely be one from my Chicago trip next week as well… featuring a lot of Pizza.
Anyway, before I get sidetracked rambling about pizza and my travels I thought it was time to do something a bit different. A week or so ago one of my closest friends put out a Facebook status declaring she wasn’t doing too good and asking someone to send her cake. So I am. She is currently doing a Paleo diet, which is something that I’m not even going to begin to pretend I’m an expert on. So she sent me across a few ideas she’d found while she herself had been doing Paleo cooking research.
I opted for Sweet Potato & Ginger Brownies. A lot of the Paleo recipes I came across asked for ingredients which I likely wouldn’t use again, unless I was to regularly do Paleo things. This meant that I wanted to be careful with what I was baking and not shell out for a heap of fancy ingredients. Being my first attempt at this sort of thing I also wanted to keep it simple. These Sweet Potato Paleo Brownies were just right. With the only slightly awkward (read: Expensive) thing I needed to buy being Coconut Flour. I opted for this recipe here.
Plenty of the Paleo recipes call for sweet potato or avocado, often both. They help replace a lot of the flour, butter and chocolate, the avocado being naturally oily and also creamy. The sweet potato being good to bake and help hold things together. A few other recipes that use these sorts of things can be found here.
Oh yeah and the big news? I’m moving to London at the start of October.
- 1 Large Sweet Potato (approx. 2 cups once mashed)
- 3 Eggs
- 57g Butter
- 60ml Honey
- 3 Tablespoons Coconut Flour
- 3 Tablespoons Cocoa Powder
- 2 teaspoons cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon ground ginger
- ¼ teaspoon nutmeg
- ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
- ¼ teaspoon baking powder
- pinch of salt
- 75g Dark Chocolate, chopped roughly.
- Peel and dice the sweet potato. Place in a pan of boiling water and boil until tender.
- Mash the potatoes until smooth.
- Preheat the oven to 180 °C(160 °C fan assisted) prepare and line a 9x13 inch brownie tin.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer combine the potato, butter, honey and vanilla.
- Add the dry ingredients and mix well, then stir in the chocolate.
- Pour into the prepared tin and spread into the corners.
- Place in the middle of the preheated oven and bake for 30-35 minutes (a tooth pick inserted into the middle should come out clean).
- Remove from the oven and place on a rack, only removing from the pan once cooled.
These sounds really interesting. I’m going to have to give them a try and look into the paleo diet a bit more!
I’m still undecided. I need to give a few more recipes a go before I’m sold!
These look amazing! I’m tempted to give this a go although I am somewhat of a disaster in the kitchen. I’ve never heard of this Paleo diet so might look into it.
Oh, and (almost) welcome to London! 🙂 We should meet up for a drink or two when you’re here!
They really aren’t too hard so you should! I tried them a second time over and melted the chocolate and butter together in that time, which also worked well.
And that sounds good. We should organise some form of MaleBloggers meet up at some point.