Black bean Brownies

[KookyCat]

ive been experimenting again, this time on behalf of my Godson who was taking part in a "Healthy Eating" course at school. It's been interesting because he's been learning about carbohydrates and how the body metabolises different foods (I'm actually quite impressed) including the specific heat capacity of foods (when you set food alight and then dunk them in water and see how much they increase the relative temperature of the water and work out the energy released). The penultimate project was to bake a food that was nice, less than 30g of carb per portion, included a veg, pulse or bean and was sweetened with something other than table sugar. So we made black bean brownies and they're lovely, and don't have a hideous impact on blood sugar. They're sweetened with maple syrup so not quite as good as sweet potato brownies but still a nice treat and they freeze well. Recipe link below, we made them slightly smaller and some with walnuts and some with pistachio and we didn't activate the nuts, one batch was made with butter, one with coconut oil and both are lovely. We did slightly smaller slices to get 30 brownies in all and reckoned on around 15g of carb each, but we had conflicting info about the carb content of the beans (2 different brands of carton) which irritated godson no end, as did the different carb values for maple syrup (depends on the quality, the younger the sap the less sweet). In fact he's decided he's not going to be diabetic because it's too confusing...out of mouths of babes 🙂

Next week I'm talking to the class about diabetes and insulin (eek) and godson has volunteered to do a blood sugar test before and after jelly babies should be fun

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/10271399/Black-bean-brownies-recipe.html