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Healthy-ish Double Chocolate Salted Caramel Brownies

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There is nothing like this. I promise. All of the good things combined and more than you have ever wanted. On the bottom we have the fudgy and chocolaty brownie (which already is so good on its own), then we have the creamy salted date caramel layer, which is just heaven and then everything is topped with a crunchy chocolate layer. If you are not hungry by now, I do not know what would make you hungry…

What’s special about this dish?

Well, a lot actually. The brownies are refined sugar and butter and made with wholewheat flour. So, they are pretty healthy actually. Then for the caramel, instead of cream, butter and sugar we are only blending dates, coconut milk and sea salt. This will become really creamy and thick and just tastes amazing!! Honestly, it was a mistake not having combined brownies and date caramel for such a long time! This combo is out of the world. Not exaggerating. So the brownie is pretty healthy, easy to make and still tastes really good!

Is this dish healthy?

Yepyep, as already mentioned, unlike regular brownies, this one is not loaded with sugar and saturated fats. It’s made out of eggs, coconut sugar (which still does contain sugar but less than white, refined sugar, plus it also comes with other nutrients), vanilla, oil (which is high in unsaturated fats), wholewheat flour (great source of fibre) and cacao powder (actually really good for you because it is super high in antioxidants)

Obviously we also have chocolate (super good for your soul 🙂 – when purchasing the chocolate, make sure to check the label to best get one that has been sweetened with any form of natural sweetener and does not contain a bunch of ingredients you don’t know and cannot pronounce). Plus, the dates, which also are really high in fibre, and dates in general are a super beneficial food for you as they are a great source of antioxidants and vitamins). So you see – all in all, pretty healthy. And especially healthy for your soul!

How to make this dish:

Easy peasy, chocolate squeezy. Or something like that. No, this is fairly easy. No eggs need to be separated, no complicated things need to be done. It essentially comes down to melting chocolate in the microwave, whipping eggs, sugar and vanilla till fluffy and then pouring in the chocolate and oil, as well as the flour-cacao powder mixture. That’s already it for the brownie, so very safe to make for everyone.

The caramel layer is not much more difficult. If you have soft dates (like medjool dates), then they blend perfectly fine. If yours are a bit harder, you can just soak them in hot water for a few hours and they will also become soft, which makes them easier to blend. So these are then just mixed with the coconut milk and the sea salt and that’s it. The chocolate layer on top is very self-explanatory, so you just need to melt the chocolate and pour it above. It’s easier if the other layers have cooled down a bit.

Meal prep friendly?

In theory yes! In real life, let’s say, I’d be surprised. Every time we make them, they’re gone within 3 days (If they even last this long). But yes, in theory they would definitely last up until a week in the fridge if covered or stored in an air tight container. If you have too many and make them on batch, you could also freeze some and slowly thaw them up before eating (so just placing them at room temperature and slowly letting them unfreeze).

In terms of how to best have these, there is no right answer. Breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, dessert. Do we even need to ask when to best have brownies? Is there even a time where you cannot have brownies? I hope not. How to best have them is a different question. They are really good and rich on their own, so there is no need to add anything else, although they go great with some ice cream.

This recipe really is a must try for all chocolate lovers out there! Easy, healthyish and so worth it to make. They’ll upgrade ANY week! I hope you genuinely like them and enjoy making them!

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Healthy-ish Double Chocolate Salted Caramel Brownies

The best (and only) brownie recipe you'll ever need! This is easy, not your average brownie and so good.

Course Dessert, Snack
Prep Time 20 Minuten
Cook Time 20 Minuten
Total Time 40 Minuten
Servings 12 slices

What you will need

For the brownies:

  • 3 eggs
  • 180 g coconut sugar
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla powder
  • 100 g milk chocolate (preferably one that has been sweeneed with natural sweetener like coconut sugar)
  • 100 g dark chocolate (preferably one that has been sweeneed with natural sweetener like coconut sugar)
  • 120 ml oil (flavor neutral oil)
  • 120 g whole wheat flour
  • 40 g cacao powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder

For the rest:

  • 250 g dates (soft ones work best – if you do not have soft ones, you can soak them in hot water for a few hours)
  • 150 ml coconut milk
  • a pinch sea salt
  • 100 g chocolate (preferably one that has been sweeneed with natural sweetener like coconut sugar)

How to

For the brownies:

  1. Melt both chocolates in the microwave, then combine with the oil and let cool a bit. Whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla for about 5 minutes until fluffy.

Love,
Katie // Une Petite Cuisinière

Super Easy & Cozy Double Chocolate Granola

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Double Chocolate Granola. Basically the taste of hot chocolate in form of granola on top of your yoghurt, porridge, nice cream or whatever. Pretty amazing. And pretty easy to make. Not convinced yet? Pretty healthy and soso delish! 

It’s been a while since I shared my last granola recipe – which was a mango coconut granola. We are in December now, which makes it kinda unsuitable for me to be eating a tropical granola (tbh this would only make me miss summer ever more) so I needed something else. First I though Chai Granola, because obviously everything chai is unbeatable but then I realised that I maybe already have shared quite a lot of chai recipes sooo – we are doing hot chocolate! And it is not in the tiniest bit less delicious! 

What’s special about this dish?

Not that it is a chocolate granola – no – it is a double chocolate granola. Chocolate before baking and chocolate after baking. Because who could have enough chocolate? Plus, it is really easy to make, and you can really top off anything with it. Or you could, as I do, eat it straight from the jar. And it works perfect for the pre Christmas time but tbh it is delicious at any time of the year!

Is it healthy? 

It definitely is healthyish. Oats are a great source of carbohydrates and protein, nuts provide essential fats and protein too. The cacao powder is extremely high in antioxidants and has actually been shown to have several health benefits. But as any dessert or sweet dish, we need something to sweeten it up and make it delicious! In this case we are using maple syrup or honey. Yes, these both still contain sugar but they also come along other nutrients and therefore are a bit more beneficial for our bodies than refined white sugar. And since we are not using tremendous amounts of it, it won’t hurt anyone. 

How to make this dish: 

This is fairly simple. OK you probably read this in all my recipe blog posts haha buttt it really is. Why? All you need to do is chop the nuts, mix them with the oats. Then you melt together the cacao powder, honey or maple and oil and hat it up. When this is combined well, you need to mix the oat-nut mixture with this and pop it onto a baking tray to bake. 

When done, just sprinkle some fresh chocolate and let it melt into the granola. When this hardens again, you’ll have these super nice little chocolate chunks in your granola, which is so good. Now you just need to toss in the cranberries and that already is it! Super easy right? 

Perfect Christmas gift

Homemade presents always are the most loved ones. And this granola is a perfect idea for such. Just make a bit more of it, pack it into a cute jar along with a kind little letter and bring it to your loved ones. It is not only easy to make for you but it definitely will also make them smile!

I hope that you will enjoy this recipe and make it over and over! Have a beautiful advent and enjoy the time!

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Super Easy & Cozy Double Chocolate Granola

It's like having hot chocolate in form of granola. So easy. Se delicious. Pretty healthy. All you need this winter!

Course Breakfast, Dessert
Prep Time 10 Minuten
Cook Time 10 Minuten
Total Time 20 Minuten
Calories 156 kcal

What you will need

  • 200 g rolled oats
  • 30 g almonds
  • 30 g hazelnuts
  • 30 g walnuts
  • 5 tbsp cacao powder
  • 2 tbsp oil
  • 4 tbsp maple syrup
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • a pinch sea salt
  • 80 g dark chocolate
  • 3 tbsp cranberries

How to

  1. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

    Roughly chop up the nuts. In a bowl combine them with the oats.

  2. In the meantime heat up the oil, maple, cinnamon, salt and cacao powder until everything has motlen together. Toss the oats and nuts in the mixture.

  3. Lay on a baking tray with parchment paper and bake for about 10-12 minutes till crispy.

  4. In the meantime chop up the chocolate in small chunks (about 0.5cm) and toss them into the baked granola. Let cool completely and then toss in the cranberries.

  5. Enjoy with yoghurt, milk, oatmeal, ice cream, nice cream or just snack it straight form the jar!

Happy cooking,
Love,
Katie // Une Petite Cuisinière

Vegan Magnum

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Summer is around the corner. It is finally officially time to eat ice cream (not that we wouldn’t have been eating any for the rest of the year). I think pretty much everyone is excited about this like a little child. However, as tasty as it is, it most of the time is not healthy. Unfortunately. So, guess what?! We are making it ourselves and making a healthy version of the classic.

My Ice-Cream Love ??

I have always been a fan of ice cream. Even when I was super little, or maybe especially then! We have a series of pictures showing meaning eating an ice cream and it is hilarious. The first picture, me sitting in the sand with the ice cream in the hand. The second one was me (still sitting at the same place) with ice cream all over my mouth. And the third one, the best one, me looking really sad at the scoop of ice cream that is not in the cone any more but all over my dress. Yes, I always had a passion for food, and no I was not always a clean and tidy eater. My parents always said that one could read the Manu off of my shirt because I pretty much ALWAYS stained it with what I was eating.

But fast forward, plenty years later I still really enjoy eating ice cream, although it ends up in my mouth and not on my shirt now. In my family, to. be honest we eat lots of ice cream. We rarely (maybe like twice a year) have cake after lunch as a dessert or in the afternoon, as it is really common in Austria, but we most of the time we’ll have ice cream.

Why is Ice cream not healthy?

Next time you buy some at the super market you can check the ingredients. You’ll be surprised by all of the ingredients used. Besides some chemicals and flavour extracts (or „natural flavours“) in most ice creams you will find a ton of sugar and a good amount of cream in them. This quickly loads up to about 20 g of sugar per ice cream and 15 g of fat. And all of this in one single ice cream!

How to choose a healthier ice cream

Of course, not every single ice cream has this nutritional value. There are simple and easy ways to choose a healthier ice cream, both in a supermarket but also in a fresh Gelateria. Always remember that fruit – based ice cream is healthier than non fruit based ice cream. Because of three reasons: Fruits are already sweet themselves, so there is no need to add much sugar, the have more vitamins and fibre and usually, in fruit Ice creams you will not find heavy cream or other fatty add-ins. Without the addition of sugar or cream, these ice cream usually tend to be half or 2/3 as high in calories as cream based ice cream like chocolate, stracciatella or hazelnut. So when you want to opt for a healthier version, be more on the fruitier side.

How to make healthy ice cream

There are several ways on how to make ice cream yourself. This depends on what ice cream you want to make. If you want to make something similar to what you can get in a Gelateria, a super simple version of this is to simply make nice cream/ smoothie bowls. You can find many many recipes of such on my Instagram (every week there is a new one coming).

In this blog post I am going to show you how to make a popsicle one. This also is really simple. It is easiest if you have a form for popsicles at home (you can find plenty of those on amazon). If you do not want to purchase one that is fine too. What you should do then is to pour the ice cream mixture into a loaf pan and freeze it in such. Before dunking it in the melted chocolate take it out of the fridge. Take a sharp knife and dip it in hot water. Then carefully cut the big block of ice cream apart into popsicle sized squares. On the lower end (the thin side) cut a small whole in the ice cream with the knife. It should be just big enough to fit a wooden skewer to hold the ice cream. Dip the skewer in the molten chocolate nd stick it into the ice cream. Let this freeze until it all sticks together. Once it holds well, you can dip it in the molten chocolate.

Summer can come!

Yes, making ice cream yourself is not difficult. Neither is making healthy ice cream yourself. With just very few ingredients you can make a super tasty and healthy ice cream yourself to have healthy treats in the freezer all summer long!

I hope you’ll love this recipe as much as I do and enjoy summer!

I hope you’ll love this recipe as much as I do and enjoy summer!

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Healthy Vegan Magnum

A vegan version of the classic summer popsicle. Too good to be true, plus it is super healthy & vegan!

Course Dessert, Snack
Prep Time 10 Minuten
Chilling time 6 Stunden
Total Time 6 Stunden 10 Minuten
Servings 8 popsicles
Calories 273 kcal

What you will need

  • 1 banana
  • 200 ml coconut milk
  • 200 g soy yoghurt
  • 60 g maple syrup
  • 1 tbsp vanilla extract
  • 160 g dark chocolate (vegan)
  • 1 tbsp coconut oil
  • 50 g cashews Soaked in water for at least 4 hours

How to

  1. In a bowl or a blender mash the banana. Drain the cashews. Add them along with the coconut milk, soy yoghurt, maple syrup and vanilla to a blender or a bowl with a hand blender and mix until everything is well combined and a smooth consistency is reached. Pour into the ice cream form (if you do not have one check out the paragraph in the blog post that says "How to make healthy ice cream").

    Freeze for at least 5 hours to overnight.

    After 5 hours melt the chocolate and coconut oil in either the microwave or on a double boiler. Take the popsicle form out of the freezer and run it under hto water so you can easily get the popsicles out. Place some parchment paper on a large plate.

  2. Dip each ice cream in the molten chocolate and place on the plate. Once you have done this with every ice cream place it in the freezer again for at least 30 minutes.

    Enjoy!

Happy cooking,
Enjoy,
Katie // Une Petite Cuisinière

Black Bean Brownies (vegan option)

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Brownies have never been that healthy, simple and delicious. Packed with protein and fiber they are super fudgy and chocolate-y. You do not taste the beans but they are still hidden in and sneak in nutrients. My new favourite brownie recipe! Healthy, vegan option and so fudge.

I am actually not a huge chocolate cake fn but brownies are something different. I do not know what it is, maybe because they are fudgier?! I don’t know, but they are good. But since brownies are not always the healthiest choice, I decided to switch some things out and sneak some healthy stuff in, to make them nourishing but still super delicious.

So the secret ingredients in this recipe are the black beans. Originally I wanted to try out sweet potato brownies, and I did, but they were a massive fail. When they were warm and straight out of the oven they were good but as soon as they cooled down, they did not taste like anything anymore and were just not good. But I was so excited to share a healthy brownie recipe so I continued trying out different versions ad that is how I came up with this black bean brownie recipe.

The great thing is that they are really easy to make. You do not need anything else than a fork but if you have a food processor it makes it easier. You need some black beans to mash, some eggs, or some flax or chia eggs for a vegan substitution (to make one „vegan egg“ combine 1 tbsp of either chia or flax seeds with 3 tbsp water and let sit for 5 minutes), milk or plant based milk, whole wheat flour, baking powder, cocoa powder and dark chocolate.

As for the sweetener you have two options. You can use dates to sweeten things up, which is my preferred choice, or coconut, brown or normal sugar. I prefer dates because in comparison with the alternatives, they have way more other nutrients. Dates are high in fiber, protein, and other vitamins and minerals whereas conventional sugar do not have any of those. But I know that not everyone is a fan of dates so I have got two recipes for you. They are pretty much the same, just differ a little because of the different textures of the sweeteners. Honestly, I would recommend to make the date version, because you cannot taste the dates and it is slightly healthier.

You might think, chocolate, that isn’t healthy? Actually it can be! Do not get me wrong and now think that every chocolate is super healthy, gosh no! What you need to be aware of are 2 main things; first, the darker, aka the higher the percentage of cocoa in it, the healthier it is. This is because cocoa is loaded with antioxidants and protein and actually is healthy in its pure form. The flavour of dark chocolate might not be everyone’s favourite but in this recipe it really works because you have other sweeteners. The second thing you should be aware of is the sugar added. If sugar is the first or second ingredient on the ingredients list, maybe this is not the best chocolate, because that means that there is a lot of added sugar. And also it depends on which sugar is added. Nowadays, you can find hundreds of chocolates at supermarkets or organic shops and there are some great healthy choices. I always put it that way: if you can pronounce every ingredient on the ingredients list and there is not a ton of sugar added, it is pretty save to say that it is healthy.

So that was a lot of information on chocolate now but who couldn’t talk about chocolate for hours? Anyway, I love making this recipe because it is really simple and my entire family likes it. Even my brother (!!) who is not the best friend of experimental, healthy or vegan things. BUT he liked it, because you could not taste any of those aspects.

The brownies taste best with a scoop of ice cream or coconut yoghurt and last for about a week in an air tight container or covered with foil outside the fridge. I do not recommend to store them in the fridge because they will loose some of their flavour.

I hope that you like them as well and will enjoy making them!
Happy cooking,
Kathi // Une Petite Cuisinière

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Black Bean Brownies (w/ dates)

A super fudgy, decadent and healthy version of regular brownies. Paces with protein and fiber (and of course chocolate) they make the ideal snack or dessert!

Course Dessert, Snack
Prep Time 10 Minuten
Cook Time 25 Minuten
Total Time 35 Minuten
Servings 12 brownies
Calories 149 kcal

What you will need

  • 4 eggs can be substituted for chia or flax egg (to substitute 1 egg, mix 1 tbsp of chia or groung flax seeds with 3 tbsp of water and let sit for 5 minutes), this makes a vegan version
  • 180 g kidney beans
  • 200 g dates soaked in hot water for 10 minutes to soften them up
  • 1 tbsp maple syrup
  • 50 ml oat milk or any other milk or plant based milk
  • 60 g dark chocolate the darker, the better
  • 50 g unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 50 g wholewheat flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • some chocoalte chips

How to

  1. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

    Place the beans in a food processor and plse until it forms a smooth paste. You can also mash them down with a fork. Add the eggs and mix or blend until everything is combined.

    Blend the dates until smooth. Add them along with the oat milk, maple syrup and molten chocolate to the bean mixture.

    In another bowl combine the flour, cacao powder and baking powder and mix until combined. Gently fold the flour mixture under the other ingredients.

    Pour in a baking tray, which is filled with parchment paper. Sprinkle it with chocolate chips and bake for 20-25 minutes.

    Peak into the brownies with a toothpic or a fork. When it comes out without any dough sticking on it, the brownies are done.

    Take them out and let them cool out. Enjoy with some icecream.

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Black Bean Brownies (with normal sugar)

A delicious, fudgy, chocolate-y and healthy twist on the regular bronies. Packed with Protein and fiber ( and of course chocolate) but healthier.

Course Dessert, Snack
Servings 12 servings
Calories 140 kcal

What you will need

  • 3 eggs ca be substituted for chia or flax egg (to substitute 1 egg, combine 1 tbsp of chia or ground flax seeds with 3 tbsp of water and let sit for 5 minutes), for a vegan option
  • 180 g black beans (from the can)
  • 160 g coconut sugar can be substituted for brown or normal sugar
  • 60 g dark chocolate the darker the better
  • 70 g flour
  • 50 g cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • some chocolate chips

How to

  1. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

    Place the beans in a food processor and plse until it forms a smooth paste. You can also mash them down with a fork. Add the eggs and mix or blend until everything is combined. Add the sugar and molten chocolate to the bean mixture. 

    In another bowl combine the flour, cacao powder and baking powder and mix until combined. Gently fold the flour mixture under the other ingredients.

    Pour in a baking tray, which is filled with parchment paper. Sprinkle it with chocolate chips and bake for 20-25 minutes. 

    Peak into the brownies with a toothpic or a fork. When it comes out without any dough sticking on it, the brownies are done. 

    Take them out and let them cool out. Enjoy with some icecream.