Sweet potato and Orange Brownies
This one is a bit of a labour of love, but so worth the time it takes! It doesn’t actually have too much hands-on time, but baking the sweet potato and leaving time to cool before icing means it takes a while from first switching on the oven to be able to get that first taste of the finished product!
Ingredients
For the brownies:
500g sweet potato – this can be one big sweet potato or a couple of smaller ones, it doesn’t matter.
60g ground almonds
60g hot chocolate protein powder – I used this because I had it in the cupboard and meant I didn’t add any other sugar to the recipe. If you have standard chocolate powder I think it would work well if you added 60g of this and then a tablespoon of honey.
30g cacao powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 large orange
2 eggs
For the icing:
60g dark chocolate (at least 70%)
1 tablespoon cacao powder
80g low fat Greek yoghurt (I use a kind that doesn’t have any extra sugar to compensate for being low fat)
Method:
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
- Bake the sweet potato in the oven until soft, if using a 500g + sweet potato this will take about 1hr 15mins – be sure to poke holes in the sweet potato with a fork/knife to ensure it heats through to the middle.
- When cooked cut open and leave to completely cool.
- Scoop out the flesh of the sweet potato (discard the skin) and mash.
- Add the ground almonds, hot chocolate protein powder (or chocolate protein powder and some honey), cacao and baking powder into a large mixing bowl.
- Grate in the zest of the orange.
- Stir well to combine.
- Crack in the eggs and add about 1/3 of the juice of the orange.
- Add the mashed sweet potato.
- Stir the mixture until all ingredients are well combined.
- Line a brownie baking tray with baking parchment.
- Place the mixture into the brownie tray, making the mixture as even as possible.
- Bake in the oven (still at 180 degrees Celsius) for 30 minutes.
- Cool the cooked brownie mixture in the tray for 20 minutes and then transfer to a cooling wire.
- Ensure the brownie mixture is fully cooled before making the icing – leave them at least a couple of hours at room temperature.
- Start making the icing my breaking up the chocolate into small chunks and placing in a bowl on top of a simmering saucepan of water (this prevents the burning that can occur if a microwave is used to melt chocolate).
- Once melted add 2/3 of the rest of the orange juice and stir into the chocolate.
- Add the cacao and the Greek yoghurt and stir until you have a smooth mixture – if it is too runny add more cacao, if too thick add more orange juice.
- Spread the icing on top of the cooled brownie mixture.
- Chill for 20 mins in the fridge and then cut the brownie mixture into squares – you can choose on the size!
- Store the brownies in an air tight container – they will last a few days but none have mine had survived long enough to see if they’d survive a week!
Hope you enjoy and have fun making and sharing these!
Emma x