Gluten Free Brownies

I’m a big fan of the lazy Sunday, though these days my lazy Sundays have taken on a new look the older I get. Often filled with cleaning and trips to the grocery store, they have become more of a prep for the week.

Today mine started with a chilly 6.5 mile run through Discovery Park with a great friend, taking in the spectacular view and catching up with good news and nourishing my soul with exercise.

Recently, my husband decided to try going gluten free, and I'm doing my best to be supportive (and since I do 99% of the cooking anyway) I decided to go right along with him. It’s pushed me past my comfort zone and forced me to learn new things about baking and cooking that I didn’t know and am forever grateful to have explored.Often gluten free things can be even richer and denser without the flour to fluff things up and I for one, especially when it comes to brownies, like it dense.

While we’re currently past the gluten free period of our lives together (for now anyway) and while my husband is not actively avoiding gluten, I can still enjoy getting creative with my baking. I’ve made a fair amount of gluten free cakes but wanted to see if I could get that to translate into a brownie, and I gotta say, not disappointed with the result.

Try these out when you have an extra half hour or so and you’ll have something to enjoy on your lazy Sunday, whatever that means for you.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time : 25 minutes | Serves : well… that all depends…

Ingredients :

1 cup sugar

1 1/4 cup dark chocolate chips

1/2 cup coconut oil

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1/2 oat flour (you can make this yourself by just grinding oats in the blender)

4 eggs

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp vanilla

Instructions :

1.Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 8X8 square pan with parchment paper and spray with non stick spray.

2. Melt the coconut oil and 1 cup of the chocolate chips, you can do this on the stove top or in the microwave. If you go the microwave route just make sure you do it in about 30 second intervals and stir in between

3. In the meantime, beat the eggs and sugar together in a stand mixer on low, you don’t want them to get frothy, just combined. When chocolate has melted, and cooled, add slowly to eggs and combine. You’ll want to do this slowly so the chocolate doesn’t cook the eggs.

4. Once egg mixture and chocolate are combined, add cocoa powder, oat flour, salt and vanilla.

5. Pour mixture into prepared pan, top with remaining 1/4 cup chocolate chips. Bake for 25 minutes until knife inserted comes out clean. Let cool before cutting, if you can wait that long

*These could probably be done with almond flour or another gluten free flour but I personally like oats (duh) and oat flour is so easy to make and much cheaper than other specialty gluten free flours.