Hi there! Welcome to carrot week! This is the 7th ingredient that I’m using in my challenge. Like I said, I’m using carrots this week and I’m trying some new things with them.

I know I recently made brownies during black bean week (link here), but I wanted to make them again, but this time, using carrots! Who doesn’t love chocolate?! I wanted to see if other vegetables would work to add moisture and sweetness, as well as nutrition to a commonly unhealthy dessert.

I used this recipe (link here) and thought the use of cinnamon would make it really tasty. The carrot and cinnamon would give this carrot cake vibe, but the cinnamon and chocolate is a pretty good combination too.

The original recipe makes a small amount and uses an 8×4 pan. I decided to make a double batch so I used an 8×8 pan. I ended up cooking it for 23 minutes, but the last 5 minutes I had increased the oven temperature to 325 because it was still very raw looking before that. It came out of the oven firm to the touch and smelled super chocolatey. The only other change I made to the recipe was using unsalted butter and adding 1/4 tsp salt at the same time as the flour and cocoa powder. Note: if you are only making a single batch of these brownies, only use 1/8 tsp salt with UNsalted butter.

This was a very basic brownie recipe to make and I like that it only required one mixing bowl. In comparison to the black bean brownies, this batter looked a lot more chocolatey, so I had a feeling these ones would be more brownie-like. Also, it did have the little pieces of grated carrot but the batter overall was much smoother than the black bean batter.

I am so happy with these brownies. They were quite fluffy and had a nice balance of fudgy and cakey (after sitting in the fridge overnight, they got fudgier yum yum). They tasted rich but they really were not that unhealthy. The carrot part was not too obvious but it gave a little extra sweetness to this dessert. I liked these brownies much more than the black bean ones if I’m being honest. Sorry to anyone to lives by black bean brownies haha.

What other veggies (or even fruits) could you put into brownies? Let me know 🙂