Hey there, Gourmets!
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So – as is often the case – I’m blogging today about a recipe I tried (and modified) a few days ago.
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As you all know, I’m very much a proponent of using the “What Have I Got In the Fridge” method of ingredient selection. I’ve also got a number of friends with food allergies – including nuts and wheat – so you can imagine that baking gets pretty creative around here.
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What I made last Thursday was a modified version of the “Decadent Brownies” recipe found in The Garden of Vegan.
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As you can see, they went pretty quickly. Only one left by the time I took the picture!
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I decided to use this as my base-recipe because – after making last week’s baked custard – I was, not surprisingly, running low on eggs. An egg-free recipe was a must.
Now. Eggs are a complicated ingredient. They provide both a leavening agent (fluffy) and binding power (wet + protein) in a baked recipe, so baking without them involves some extra leg-work. In my case, if I’m modifying a recipe to remove the eggs, I’ll use semi-liquids instead of liquids (think soyghurt instead of soy milk, or shortening instead of oil) to up the binding power. In this case, though, I was working with an already-vegan recipe and so didn’t have to worry about it that much (YAY!).
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That said, I did render the recipe non-vegan by using yoghurt instead of soymilk (in part because I wanted the acidity of the yoghurt to pump up the leavening power of the baking soda already in the recipe). I also used barley flour instead of wheat flour (Barley flour still contains gluten, but there’s a little bit less of it, which makes it easier for wheat-sensitive folks to digest it).
For a variety of reasons – including various friends with nut allergies – I decided to cut out the half-cup of chopped nuts listed at the end of the ingredients list and use this instead:
Rather than using 1/3 C olive oil + 1/2 C chopped nuts, I used 1/2 C vegetable oil (lighter taste) + 1/3 C pumpkin seed butter which I blended together and then added to the batter.
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Pumpkin seed butter – like numerous other seed butters – can be a safe option for people with peanut and tree-nut allergies (NOTE: check with your friends to make sure this is the case with them). It has a creamy, earthy taste that makes it one of the queens of seed butters, in my opinion, with just the tiniest hint of natural sweetness in there as well.
Using it in my brownies gave them a smoother, richer texture as well as flecks of bright, pale green – that’s right, pumpkin seed butter is green, folks – to contrast against the dark of the chocolate.
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It was tasty, without being overwhelming, and a safe and delicious thing to serve to my friends at our weekly pot-luck. Give it a try!
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Have you used seed butters as an alternative to chopped nuts/seeds or peanut butter before? What did you use it in? How did it work?
Drop me a comment and let me know! 
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Cheers,
Allison.
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