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:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
2. 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.
3. When cooked cut open and leave to completely cool.
4. Scoop out the flesh of the sweet potato (discard the skin) and mash.
5. Add the ground almonds, hot chocolate protein powder (or chocolate protein powder and some honey), cacao and baking powder into a large mixing bowl.
6. Grate in the zest of the orange.
7. Stir well to combine.
8. Crack in the eggs and add about 1/3 of the juice of the orange.
9. Add the mashed sweet potato.
10. Stir the mixture until all ingredients are well combined.
11. Line a brownie baking tray with baking parchment.
12. Place the mixture into the brownie tray, making the mixture as even as possible.
13. Bake in the oven (still at 180 degrees Celsius) for 30 minutes.
14. Cool the cooked brownie mixture in the tray for 20 minutes and then transfer to a cooling wire.
15. Ensure the brownie mixture is fully cooled before making the icing – leave them at least a couple of hours at room temperature.
16. 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).
17. Once melted add 2/3 of the rest of the orange juice and stir into the chocolate.
18. 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.
19. Spread the icing on top of the cooled brownie mixture.
20. Chill for 20 mins in the fridge and then cut the brownie mixture into squares – you can choose on the size!
21. 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