Healthier Brownies

I've been trying to eat more healthy lately, and I really don't believe in dieting. Diets never work, and I don't think it's good to deprive yourself of cravings - you just end up overindulging later.

So, I had a wicked craving for chocolate today and went searching the internet for good recipes. I decided I wanted to try a healthier option, as healthy as I could do with the ingredients I have at home at the moment, and I stumbled upon this blog! There are a lot of recipes I want to try on here!

To keep it simple, I chose to try her Chocolate Pumpkin Brownies:

• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2/3 cup + 1 tbsp sugar
• 1/2 cup canned pumpkin
• 3 tbsp oil (I used coconut oil)
• 2 tbsp milk
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips

I decided on this one, because I had a can of pumpkin that we've given to Jaxson for baby food, and he's recently graduated to eating our meals - he flat out refuses to eat what I give him sometimes, but will eat whatever i'm eating. It's good. It's forcing me to eat more healthy, and it also saves me time having to make baby food for him anymore!

Unfortunately, I didn't have any chocolate chips (or I would have just eaten those to serve my craving!), but I did have some butterscotch chips left over from a shortbread I made for Christmas, so I decided to use those... And in-so-doing made this recipe quite a bit unhealthier! I only used 1/4 cup, because these chippits are just way too sweet for me otherwise!

So, anyway, back to the brownies!

I mixed the dry and wet ingredients separately, then combined both well. I melted the coconut oil so it would blend in better.

It was really hard to mix all the ingredients together, and the dough was quite sticky and also hard to spread into the pan. I think that if I had used canola oil instead of coconut, these two steps would have been easier!

Finally mixed well.

I spread it into into a greased 8in square pan and baked it at 330F for about 23 minutes.

I put 1 cup of the leftover pumpkin in the fridge to try this recipe from the blog for breakfast the next day (and it was awesome!), and froze the rest to use later.

I have to admit, I was really impressed with these brownies. Granted, they have quite a bit of sugar in them - next time, i'm going to try supplementing the sugar for agave or maple syrup or something to make them a bit more healthy, and see how that changes things.

But I was impressed with the consistency too, because there are no eggs! It's very nice and chewy and cake-y. A great treat. I'm glad I didn't put more butterscotch chips in, but at the same time, they're really nice in this!

They taste amazing refrigerated!