FAQ
Are classic blondies vegan?
Classic blondies, just like their dark siblings, are not vegan.
That's because they contain butter and eggs, at the very least.
To turn brownies vegan, you'll have to find a suitable substitute for those animal products. All brownies on this website are vegan, and we used different techniques for each of them. Check them out here if you are looking for some inspiration!
You can also keep reading our other FAQs below, as we talk more about how to make a diet-friendly brownie.
How to make a healthy brownie?
Take a classic brownie recipe and look at the ratios of ingredients used. You'd see that traditional brownies broadly consist of:
More than 52% is just butter and sugars! Not quite the picture of health, right? Luckily for the brownie-loving world, unhealthy brownies are not the only ones that are so darn tasty. There are lots of healthy variations (some of which are also vegan and gluten-free) that are just as gooey, fudgy, and irresistible as the classic treat.
Take a look at our current list our healthy brownies, for example:
All these brownies are vegan, gluten-free, and made without added sugars, and have a much better nutritional profile. What is their secret? What makes a wholesome brownie? Here is a list of tips and tricks you can follow to start baking healthy brownies and blondies yourself.
Replace butter with low-fat ingredients that act as a binder.
Use naturally sweet ingredients like fruit instead of white sugar.
Use dark chocolate (90%+) instead of other varieties.
Add superfoods or highly-nutritions ingredients to your brownie dough.
[Optional - for Gluten-Free brownies or low-carb brownies] Swap wheat flour for gluten-free or low-carb replacements, like blended chickpeas, cauliflowers, black beans, etc.
In the FAQs below, we will talk more about each of these points.
How to make brownies fudgy without using butter?
Butter is what makes brownies fudgy. That is true, but you can achieve the same result without using butter, nor any other dairy product. You can even get incredibly gooey brownies using the most unexpected ingredient, like cauliflower.
What we need is to find a combination of ingredients that act like butter, bind like butter, but have none of the bad stuff in it.
Recently we developed two brownie recipes using some rather unconventional ingredients: cauliflower and zucchini.
Neither of them has any dairy-products, nor refined butter replacements like margarine. Yet, they are insanely gooey and fudgy. Like really, really fudgy! They are wonderful.
These are the two things we did to make those brownies fudgy without using butter:
We used a little bit of nut spread (almond or peanuts, or any other nut-based spread) to replace the binding properties of butter.
We kept the batter more liquid than you would do in the classic recipe, and let the brownie slab cool down in the fridge for up to an hour before cutting it.
This last tip is kind of the secret here. The ingredients will naturally bind and harden with time in a cool place. By starting with a softer, more liquid batter, you end up with a fudgier consistency after a little nap in the fridge. The result? A fudgier brownie that doesn't use any unhealthy ingredient to be so.
Want to practice it yourself? Follow our cauliflower brownies recipe, and then adapt the same technique to other plant-based ingredients you fancy.
How to make brownies without added sugars?
Preparing healthy brownies or blondies without any sugar is incredibly easy.
You can do so by replacing white sugar with naturally sweet ingredients like fruit or with natural sweeteners like erythritol.
We found that pitted dates and bananas are a great sugar alternative in brownies. They also blend into a dense and creamy paste, helping to get that fudgy consistency that we all love in this dessert.
Erythritol and stevia are natural sweeteners perfect for preparing diabetes-friendly sweet treats as they have zero sugars and zero calories.
How to make gluten-free blondies?
The classic blondie recipe includes wheat flour, and therefore it is not suitable for those following a gluten-free diet.
Oats are a great alternative to plain flour when preparing brownies. You can grind them into flour simply by pulsing the oat flakes in your food processor. Oats also help to get a denser and moister brownie dough.
Other gluten-free options you can try include coconut flour, rice flours, or almond meal.
You can even skip the flour altogether as we did in our zucchini brownies for a super fudgy consistency. Also, you can use starch-rich chickpeas, as we did in our chickpea blondies, or opt for black beans.
