bakeitup

I have a friend going through food allergy testing who currently can't eat gluten, dairy, corn, soy, or refined sugar, but can have chocolate with a sufficiently high percentage of cacao. Brownies were a challenge, but not an impossible one!

I adapted this vegan brownie recipe to come up with the following:

1 1/4 cups sweet rice flour
- I used stone ground rice flour, cause that's what I had. I think almond flour would be a good choice as well.

1 cup brown sugar, 1 cup white sugar
- I used 2 and 1/4 cups of brown rice syrup, which led to some other alternations to maintain the liquid balance. If you can find date sugar, I bet it'd work better.

1 cup water
- reduced to 1/3 cup because of the brown rice syrup

1/2 cup vegan butter, melted plus
- Most vegan butters have soy or corn oil, so changed to about a 1/3 cup flax oil

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
- switched to dark chocolate 72% cacao chips

3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
- made sure to use organic to avoid sneaky additives

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Preheat oven to 350.

Heat 1/3 cup water and 1/4 cup rice flour in a saucepan until it forms a paste. Set aside to cool. (This doesn't take long or require too much cooking, you just need to get the flour and water well-integrated)

Mix remaining cup of rice flour, baking powder, cocoa powder and salt.

Stir in vanilla and flax oil.

Stir in sugar and flour/water paste. I also added honey to taste at this stage to sweeten the batter, since the rice syrup + rice flour made it less sweet than I like.

Stir in chocolate chips.

Pour into greased 9"x13" pan and bake approx 40 - 45min.

These came out fairly dense and chewy, but definitely brownie-tasting!

I still didn't think the finished product was quite chocolatey enough, so I melted approx 1/2 cup of the extra dark chocolate chips in a "double boiler" (my pottery mixing bowl stuck on top of a saucepan with an inch of water in it, turned on med-low) with some honey to make a ganache/frosting, let it cool for a minute, and spread it over the top. DELICIOUS. And my friend agreed!

cross-posted to

saramily