Brownies
My good friend Jeff is a vegan, and every time I have an event that needs truly vegan recipes, I ask him for help. So this weekend, where there was the chance that somone vegan might show up, I hopped onto IRC and made him transcribe the brownie recipe stuck to his fridge.
It's a very nice recipe to look at. Not just because it's quite tasty, but also because the scribing and the paper is very good too. I think it was a gift, and it's a very pretty thing. Anyway, the recipe is a variation on Rachel's Amazing Brownies a.k.a. "no way these are vegan".
I've fiddled with the ingredients, as all cooks are wont to do, but they work out marvellously. Chocolately, moist, and fluffy. At least, that's what I heard from the people who were busy devouring them.
Addendum: I recently made these brownies, but with a different type of firm tofu. Unfortunately, they did not set properly at all and came out undone in the middle and overdone on the edges. So you will have to experiment, I think, to get the right outcome.
Chocolate Chunk Brownies
Ingredients
- 1 cup firm tofu
- 1¼ cup soy milk
- 3 tablespoons fruit jam
- 4 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 4 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 3 cups brown sugar
- 1½ cups dutch-process cocoa powder
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 150g chocolate chunks
- Preheat the oven to 180°C.
- In a blender, purée the tofu and soy milk until smooth. Try to get the freshest tofu you can, so it doesn't smell funny. Also, try to get soy milk that actually resembles milk for this recipe, I find that So Nice worked really well.
- Add the jam, vegetable oil, vanilla extract, and brown sugar to the blender and mix. I chose raspberry jam, which works really well with chocolate. As for the vegetable oil, get something flavourless like canola or corn oil.
- In a large mixing bowl, combine the cooca, flour, baking powder and salt with a whisk. I'd like to emphasise that you should get real chocolate here, 100% unsweetened dutch-process cocoa powder is called for. Trust me.
- In a third bowl, mix the wet ingredients with the chocolate chunks. Just take a bar of chocolate and roughly chop it with a knife. Mmmm... Valrhona. You can cheat here a bit and use a lesser chocolate.
- Gradually mix in the dry ingredients with the wet. It should come to a fairly stiff dough that can still be worked with a spatula. If there are still dry spots, add a little more soy milk.
- Grease and flour a 20cm × 20cm baking tin. Scrape the brownie mix into the pan and spread it to the edges. Bake for 30 minutes in the middle rack until it is no longer gooey. You can test for doneness by sticking a toothpick into the thickest part and checking that it comes out mostly clean. The brownies will cook a little longer as they cool on a cooling rack, although I just served mine hot out of the oven.
Makes about 25 brownies.