I first spotted this recipe over on Jenna Fischer’s MySpace page, so I started referring to them as “Jenna Brownies”, but the recipe originally came from Devin Alexander at Discovery Health. (Also, please note that I found it on MySpace. How 2005! Does MySpace still exist? I don’t want to know.)
They’re simple (that should be my theme, “If it’s simple, I’m IN!”) and very tasty. They don’t have any oil in them, though they do have sugar. I’ve never tried making them with a sugar substitute, but if you do please report back on how that worked out, I’m curious (but obviously not curious enough to try it myself). It had been a while since I’d made a batch of these, and then when Nance posted her Black Bean Brownie recipe a few weeks ago, it reminded me that I hadn’t made these in a while.
Ingredients:
Unsweetened applesauce (I canned my own last Fall!), vanilla, eggs, sugar, all-purpose flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, salt, and semi-sweet mini chocolate chips. The recipe calls for a wee bit of instant espresso powder, but I don’t keep that stuff on hand and I’ll be damned if I’m going to rush out and buy some. I think the brownies are perfectly fine without it.
Mix all your wet stuff in one bowl, all your dry stuff in a second bowl, add the dry to the wet, stir it up, and dump it in a 8×8 inch cake pan, which you’ve already sprayed with cooking spray. The original recipe calls for butter-flavored cooking spray, but I just use whatever I have on hand (which isn’t usually butter-flavored, for the record). The original recipe also called for you to sprinkle the mini chocolate chips on top of the batter before baking, but I prefer to stir mine in because that’s just how I roll.
Bake 24 – 26 minutes or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out dry.
This makes 12 1-brownie servings, but we make 9 brownies out of this recipe instead of 12, which I guess makes them 117.33333333 calorie brownies for us.
They are surprisingly filling, and so good you might be tempted to eat a second one. DON’T or you’ll be groaning about how full you are. Trust me!
God help me, if I ever got a decent picture of food, I’d keel over and die from the shock of it. They taste better than they look, I swear it!
Nutritional information, according to Devin Alexander (and only because I can cut and paste it into this post; don’t expect nutritional information on any kind of a regular basis, folks): Each brownie has: 88 calories, 2 g protein, 19 g carbohydrates, 1 g fat, less than 1 g saturated fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 1 g fiber, 133 mg sodium
- ¼ c. unsweetened applesauce
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 4 egg whites (I use two whole eggs instead, which probably ups the calorie count)
- 1 c. sugar
- ¼ c. all-purpose flour
- ½ c. cocoa powder
- ½ tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp instant espresso powder
- ½ tsp salt
- ¼ c. semi-sweet chocolate chips
- Butter-flavored cooking spray (or whatever cooking spray you have on hand)
- Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Spray an 8x8 inch cake pan with spray.
- Mix applesauce, vanilla, egg whites (eggs) and sugar until well combined.
- Add flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, espresso powder (if using) and salt. Stir in the mixture until just combined with no lumps. Pour into prepared pan.
- Sprinkle the chips evenly over the top (I mix my chips into the batter).
- Bake for 24 - 26 minutes or until toothpick inserted into the center comes out dry.
- Nutritional info according to Devin Alexander: Each brownie has: 88 calories, 2 g protein, 19 g carbohydrates, 1 g fat, less than 1 g saturated fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 1 g fiber, 133 mg sodium
That looks yummy – I’ll definitely try these. Hungry Girl has a brownie recipe that uses canned pumpkin, but the brownies came out too pumpkin-y in my opinion. I want my brownies to taste like chocolate.
Oh, these are definitely chocolatey! 🙂 I hope you enjoy them!
First, I can’t wait to make these brownies.
Second, your plagiarism warning makes me laugh, not only because it’s funny, but because I also threaten to send cats (though mine are more like hit cats).
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