Vegan PB and Banana Brownies

Recipe: PB and Banana Brownies

•  96g canola oil (around 7 T or 1/4 C + 3 T)
• 172g cocoa powder (around 2 cups)
• 120g flour (1 cup)
• 198g sugar (1 cup)
• 1 mashed up ripe banana (eq. to 1 egg)
• 3 T unsalted peanut butter (eq. to 1 egg)
• 1 additional egg substitute (flax or peanut butter for drier brownies, banana for moister brownies--experiment)
• 1/2 t salt
• peanuts and extra peanut butter (optional)

Preheat oven to 350F. Line your preferred brownie pan with tinfoil or parchment paper and grease the heck out of it. Mix mashed up banana, peanut butter, sugar, and canola oil in a bowl. Add dry ingredients and peanuts and stir until just combined (overmixing will make for some rather shoe-leather-like brownies). Pour everything in the pre-greased pan and drop spoonfuls of peanut butter on top, marbling with a spoon if desired. Bake for 20-30 or until a knife 3 inches from the edge comes out clean or almost clean. Allow to cool at least 10 minutes before attempting eat; allow to cool completely if you want to cut them without getting crumbs all over your hands.

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The great thing about vegan cooking is that a lot of times, trying to substitute for an animal-based ingredient can lead to novel flavor combinations.

That's not to say that nobody's ever made a pan of peanut-butter-and-banana flavored animal-based brownies. I'm sure someone has.

But the only reason I threw bananas in these in the first place was because I was at a friends house, and he'd run out of eggs, and of course because he's not me he didn't have a bag of flax seed in the back of his freezer.

Both bananas and peanut butter are really weird egg substitutes. Peanut butter is a strong binder with a high fat content and a strong flavor. Bananas are good moisteners, also with a strong flavor. Usually, when I use nut butter I get a really dense baked good, and when I use bananas I get something super moist and mushy. So I thought if I used both I'd get something moist and chewy and dense--the ideal brownie.

I was afraid of using too much banana, though, so I only added one egg's worth of banana, whereas I had two eggs' worth of peanut butter. The brownies tasted really good, but they were dry. I've yet to try the recipe with a different amount of banana, but I bet if you used less peanut butter you'd end up fine. And it wasn't like the brownies weren't delicious anyway.