Quadruple Chocolate Brownies

After three glorious weeks of eating dessert four times (or more) a day and bread with every meal, I thought I would never want to see sugar or carbs again, but boy was I wrong. Just the food alone in Europe is an amazing experience- fish and chips in London, baguettes and crepes in Paris, tapas in Spain, pizza and gelato in Italy- you really can't go wrong. But when I got home I was craving nothing but fruit and oatmeal, and I thought it would be easy to slide right back into my old food habits. Yet it's been a little over a week and now all I can think about is having just one more croissant, or nutella crepe, or more gelato: pistachio, lemon, banana, chocolate...really, any flavor will do.

 

But rather than pigging out on store bought ice cream or pastries that can't even compare to the real thing, I thought I would attempt to at least make something a little bit healthy. So without a recipe in hand, I marched right into the kitchen and raided the cabinets for ingredients, surprisingly finding a good amount to work with.

I pretty much just poured a bunch of different things into a mixing bowl and scribbled down measurements, coming up with it all as I went. I'll probably come back to this a little later to play around with the recipe some more, but I have to admit, they are tasty. I tried to stick with vegan, gluten-free, and sugar-free ingredients just for funsies, but go ahead and use real flour, milk, and chocolate chips, if you want.

And ta-da! My original creation- no recipe, just a little bit of luck.
Quadruple Chocolate Brownies (Vegan, Gluten-free, and Sugar-free)

Ingredients:

• 1 1/4 cup almond meal
• 1 1/4 cup rice flour
• 1/4 cup sugar-free Jell-O chocolate pudding mix
• 1/2 teaspoon cocoa
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 1 Tablespoon sugar-free chocolate syrup
• 1/2 cup agave nectar
• 1/2 cup chocolate soy milk
• 1 cup carob chips

Directions:

1. In a large bowl, combine almond meal, rice flour, salt, baking powder, pudding mix, and cocoa.
2. In an electric mixing bowl, mix canola oil, agave nectar, chocolate syrup, and soy milk.
3. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Stir in carob chips.
4. Pour mixture into an ungreased pan and bake (I baked them for 12 minutes and they were still pretty wet. If you want crispier brownies, I would suggest baking them longer. But I just put them in the fridge and they hardened up after a couple hours).