A brownie for every night of the week

Recently I have been craving brownies so much. Do you ever get an idea like that into your head and nothing but nothing will satiate it other than the item of your obsession. This obsession was pushed over the edge by a recent email from food network listing the top 20 brownie recipes with mouth-watering photographs. So just make a brownie right, melt the butter and chocolate and go to town. Problem is, in this house we are eating healthy and buttery, chocolatey, gooey brownies, though delicious, don't really fit in to that. So what's a girl to do........? Continue to crave unsatisfied or find a solution. I think if you've read any of this blog before you know me well enough to know which I chose.

The inspiration for this recipe came from one for low fat chocolate chip cookies by Tina's Chic Corner. She uses a date puree and some browned butter to replace the large amount of butter normally in cookies. This made me think of a way to replace the fat in brownies. Now, I'm gonna be honest with you dear reader, many times I put up healthy recipes on here and they really are delicious but they do tend to taste just a tiny bit healthy. When I made these healthy truffles I was obsessed with how delicious they were and showed them to my bf with so much enthusiasm. His honest review was 'These are really very tasty but......you can still kinda tell they are healthy.' So having established his level of honesty let me tell you what happened when I presented these brownies. He tried them, devoured his and then said 'these are delicious!' I replied 'and healthy too,' and his reaction was pure shock. He couldn't believe these were anything but normal full fat brownies.

Brownie (Healthy - Shhh they'll never know)

125g pitted dates
150ml water
125g Apple puree
2 tbsp Butter browned
4 eggs
2 tbsp stevia
2 tbsp granulated sugar
60g wholewheat flour
68g plain flour
100g cocoa powder
100g dark (70% or higher) chocolate
50g toasted hazelnuts
1 pinch salt
1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Chop the dates finely and place into a saucepan with the water and heat until the dates are extremely soft and all the water has reduced to a syrup. Now add the apple puree and continue to heat until boiling.

2. Cool the date and apple mixture while you melt and brown the butter in a saucepan. Do this by heating the butter on low for c 5minutes until it has turned brown.

3. If you have a convenient food processor (and maybe a dishwasher) you could blitz the date mixture. I didn't but would have if I had a dishwasher ;) Now put the mixture through a fine sieve and scrap out as much puree as you can, then discard the remaining date fibers. Now add your browned butter to the puree and mix.

4. Preheat your oven to 180'C/350'F. Beat together your eggs until they are light and fluffy, a handmixer/cake mixer would be useful here. The add the vanilla extract, stevia and sugar and keep beating until fully incorporated.

5. Melt 50g of your dark chocolate in a microwave, in 20 second bursts, mixing between. Pour the melted chocolate into the egg mixture and continue to beat.

6. Mix together your flours, cocoa powder and salt. Then alternate between additions of this and of the date mixture until everything is combined.

7. Finely chop your remaining dark chocolate into large chunks and chop your hazelnuts and add these to the mixture.

8. Butter and flour a bread tin and pour in your brownie mixture. Then bake for approx 30-40mins. When you remove from the oven a tooth pick may have mixture on it but this is fine. Use tinfoil and an oven glove to push the brownies down and then leave to cool.

Now enjoy =)