Sweet Potato & Nut Butter Brownies

After spending so much time on nuts and nut butters, I thought I'd better try a nut butter related recipe.

The original recipes for these brownies are from the following websites:

• Primal Almond Butter Pumpkin Brownies
• Peanut Butter Squash Brownies

The first time I made these brownies, I simply followed the first recipe's ingredients and the second recipe's instruction. The only changes I made were to use fork-mashed sweet potato instead of pumpkin or squash, peanut butter instead of almond butter (I wasn't about to use up all my hard-earned almond butter...) and to add a splash of vanilla and a pinch of fine sea salt.

I made them in mini-muffin cups because I don't have an 8 by 8 pan and I thought they'd be cute as bite-size brownies.

It worked out pretty well, actually! The only thing I found was that I had to reduce the temperature to 325F so they didn't burn on top before cooking through.

They turned out fine and tasted good...but they weren't anything special. They were subtly sweet and had a good texture, but they tasted too plain. Both recipes were quite basic and encouraged experimentation, so that's what I did! I decided to weigh the ingredients as I went, so I included both measurements. Here's my version...

Sweet Potato & Nut Butter "Brownies"


Ingredients:

• 240 grams (1 cup) nut butter (I used homemade, smooth peanut butter)
• 220 grams (3/4 cup) baked and pureed sweet potato 
• 1 large egg
• 50 grams (about 2.5 Tbs.) honey*
• 50 grams (about 2.5 Tbs.) maple syrup*
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/8 tsp freshly ground cloves 
• 1/8 tsp freshly ground allspice
• 1/4-1/2 tsp fine sea salt

*You could also do 100 grams of one or the other

NOTE: To get a more classic brownie look, I added about 50 grams of carob powder to half the batter. They didn't come out tasting very much like carob, so I'll probably add more next time.

Instructions:

For sweet potato:
1. Wash sweet potato and poke holes through the skin with a fork or knife
2. Bake at 375F for about 45 minutes to an hour, or until tender.
3. Once cooled enough to handle, peel skins (they should practically fall off) and puree in a food processor until smooth (or mash them with a fork, but I highly recommend puree-ing them)

For "brownies":
1. Preheat the oven to 325F and prepare a mini-muffin tin with muffin cups
2. In a bowl, beat the egg.  Add peanut butter and honey and mix until smooth
3. Add sweet potato, carob, spices, baking soda and mix until well combined
4. Spoon mixture into baking pan and bake at 325F for about 20 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean

I cannot stress how much better they tasted the second time. These are delicious; it was so difficult to stop eating them. First of all, puree-ing the sweet potato instead of just mashing it with a fork made a huge difference--the texture was so much smoother...oh, I loved the texture! They are so moist too. The spices were great and added so much flavour. With the spices, these "brownies" taste kind of like spice cake. The sweet potato is not very present, so much so that I originally forgot to mention anything about it in the first publication of this post (thanks Katie).

As I was making them, I started thinking...could they really be called brownies if they weren't brown?

So, after I'd scooped half the batter into the muffin cups, I added 50 grams of carob powder to the remaining batter. It did make them look more like classic brownies, but they didn't taste very much like carob (though the unbaked batter did...yum), so I'll add more next time. Despite the colour, I still don't think you can call these brownies--they are far too cake-like in texture.

Now on Sweets for a Saturday and