The Brownie

This is not a picture of the brownie in question. We accidentally ate our own brownie, before I got a picture of it.

I am not sure how to explain this, but I made a brownie the other day. Okay, that is not hard to explain. In my world brownies make absolute sense, so no worries there.

The weird thing is that I substituted the oil in the recipe with boiled chickpeas.

Disgusted?

Of course I wasn't acting solely on a whim - I don't know why I say "of course", because I could easily have been. But a friend of mine had told me about the trick of substituting oil in cakes and cookies with mashed chickpeas. I figured it would be a good way of cutting down on calories, adding protein and fibres (chickpeas contain that, right? Right?) and using some of my food storage.

Actually I also have 150 kilos of wheat grains in my food storage. I guess next time I can grind my own flour for the cake.

Future dinner-guests. Be afraid, be very afraid!

The cake was served with greek yoghurt with sugar and vanilla in it. Yummy! And the cake really was nice. Of course it also helped that I had added a load of chocolate pieces to the dough. Chocolate can fix everything.

However, I would change some things if I should make it again. There is still room for improvement, so to speak.

When I made the cake, I grabbed some chickpeas from my freezer (that had been soaked and boiled for an hour) and blended them with my immersion blender. The result was a nice firm paste, kinda like the texture of Samuels play dough. Which was really good for the hummus I made afterwards, using the rest of the chickpeas.

But the same second I added the paste to my batter, I knew I had made a mistake. I tried to stir the paste into my nice fluffy brownie batter, and all I got was lumps. Big chickpea lumps. It wasn't good.

After some frantic stirring, I finally put both hands into the batter and gave the batter a good long squeeze. Not such a nice experience. But I am sure me with my hands covered in lumpy batter was quite a sight to behold.

The squeezing did fix it, even though there was still some small yellow lumps here and there in the cake. Though it did match my yellow dotted tablecloth very nicely!

So next time I'll blend the chickpeas with some liquid, probably one or two of the eggs that is used for the batter. That way the chickpeas should better blend with the other ingredients. I am confident it will work!

Hope you all had a yellow-lump free day (I have no idea of what that means!)