Tanya Burr's Healthy Chocolate Brownies ... by Clare

Hello everyone,

Easter is finally upon us (yay!) which means that I can eat chocolate again (YAY!). And I was browsing the old videos of my favourite YouTubers when I came across this video by Tanya Burr where she makes brownies that are apparently 'healthy'. (Obviously, not as healthy as vegetables but healthier than the classic brownie in the supermarket.)

Normally, I don't like cooking videos because the skill of being able to cook and enjoy it has eluded me and graced other members of my family. But this one I was interested in because when I see online tutorials for anything and then attempt them, their finished product is so much different to my finished product. But this one I tried. I'll link her video because I changed three things about her recipe: I used LO Salt instead of Himalayan Salt, brown sugar instead of coconut sugar and half a cup instead of two. This was because I didn't have Himalayan Salt when I was making them and my family as a whole don't use a lot of sugar in our cooking, even if they say we should.

Tanya's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtwBjpFoZow
Apparently, the recipe is also available in her book which you can get here

Ingredients I used:
1. 300g of organic Green and Black's Dark Cooking Chocolate
2. Half a measuring cup of pure virgin coconut oil
3. One cup of FairTrade light brown sugar
4. Two cups of ground almonds
5. A pinch of salt
6. One capful of vanilla extract (a capful being the cap on the vanilla extract, not the measuring cup)
7. One teaspoon of baking powder
8. One mashed avocado (a soft, ripe avocado would make this easier. You can't taste it because it is a second substitute for butter.)
9. 3 eggs

Other stuff (because I always find this useful in recipes so that I can get it ready)
1. A large saucepan
2. A wooden spoon/spatula
3. Measuring cups of different sizes
4. Three spoons for scooping and stirring and mashing
5. Two bowls (one for eggs and one for avocado) OR One bowl (for avocado) and one mug (for eggs)
6. A baking tray (made for cooking brownies, NOT cakes)
7. A knife
8. Oven gloves

Instructions:

• Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius
• Pre-mash the avocado. The best way to do this is to cut it in half, take out the stone, scoop out of the flesh of the avocado and put it in a bowl. Use a knife and spoon to mash it and chop it as much as possible but don't worry about chunks because once it is stirred in and cooked, you can't taste it anyway.
• Pre-crack and beat the eggs, depending on your ability to do this. I am very bad at cracking eggs so I did it before starting.
• Use the spoon to put half of measuring cup of coconut oil in the saucepan
• Break up the chocolate in good sized chunks and add it in to the saucepan
• Melt the chocolate and oil together on a LOW HEAT and stir with the wooden spoon/ spatula so that it doesn't burn
• REMOVE FROM THE HEAT
• Add in the brown sugar and stir
• Add in the ground almonds, baking powder, vanilla extract, salt and avocado, stirring well after each ingredient to ensure the mixture is as smooth as possible (by this point it will not be completely smooth)
• Add in the beaten eggs and stir. (I found a folding motion to be the best way of doing this. It also means you can mash any stray chunks of avocado that are particularly and ominously large.)
• Pour into the baking tray and put it in the oven for 26 minutes.
• Leave ten minutes to cool and then chop them up into good sized brownies.

NOTE: they are very rich in consistency so keep them small.

My ingredients

And there you are! You wouldn't believe how much difficulty I had trying to put all of these pictures into this blog post. :/ It was a struggle.

Anyway,

Thanks for reading, 

Clare

Changeling by Philippa Gregory

Hello everyone,

It has been a while, I know. :( I didn't intend to keep off blogging for this long but stuff happens, I guess. But I'm back now with another book review. Surprise, surprise! I have to admit that recently I have ordered a lot of books online (around about 20), and a lot of them were by the same authors so I'm afraid my blog will start to look like a shrine. But that doesn't matter. Anyway ... on with the review.

So I read Changeling by Philippa Gregory. It is part of a trilogy called the Order of Darkness trilogy. I have to say that I was a little tentative about reading it, simply because I LOVE Philippa Gregory's books on the Tudor and Plantagenet periods and I was worried that it might not live up to my expectations. I was completely wrong about that. Changeling is set in the 1400s and tells the story about a boy called Luca Vero, who has to travel across the country, finding about what makes people scared. This is at a time when people are scared about the end of the world. There was a great fear of witchcraft and of the Devil possessing people and religion was used as a means of controlling the common people and getting them to do things. Luca travels to a convent where the nuns believe that they have been possessed and Luca has to find out what is going on.

Some themes in the book...

I think I have already done an overall theme about religion when talking about Purple Hibiscus  so I won't talk about that again. Instead, I am going to talk about fear and ignorance and the role that they play in society and control. It is a really important part of the book. The nuns in the convent are scared that the Devil has come among them and is possessing the sisters. The people in the village are scared of the werewolf. A generalisation is that people are scared about things that they don't understand or can't make sense of. One of the characters is a Muslim, in a time when Muslims were seen as heretics and pagans and Islam was very 'dangerous' because it threatened the spread of Christianity in Europe and into the Middle East. It is clear that because they don't understand her beliefs and who she is, they associate everything else that they fear with her. Not only that, but they are encouraged to do so by the bishops and the lords and those people in charge who are also scared about things that they don't understand. And now, in this day and age, although I would like to think that we don't fear so much Satan walking among us, we do have a tendency to avoid or be afraid of what we don't understand. Fear is a perfectly natural reaction to things but, as a race, we sometimes take it out of context and blow it out of proportion. Racism, particularly in the wake of terrorist attacks, can stem from ignorance which results in fear and aggression. We are scared by what we see , naturally, and we want to understand it, so we blame someone in order to personify our fear and make it seem less scary. We are scared of an apocalyptic cult that wants to destroy the world and so we blame someone innocent to reduce the anonymity of it. Obviously in the past, at the time when this book takes place, the higher, intelligent elite used religion to scare the people into submission. 'Do this or you are going to Hell.' 'Your king has been elected by God and therefore you have to follow him' 'His law is God's law'. But similarly, people didn't understand religion in the way that they perhaps understand it today because many of the religious books were in Latin and/or people couldn't read. So fear of Hell for them was real and therefore, they did as they were told.

Recommendations

The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory
This is an amazing book by the same author about Elizabeth I, her assumed affair with Robert Dudley and the scandal that surrounded the death of his wife Amy Dudley.

Wonder by R.J. Palacio
On the theme of fear in a present day setting, this is a beautiful book about a boy who was born with a facial deformity and has to go to school  and face all of the stigmas that are associated with being different.

And that's the end of this post. :) I hope you enjoyed it.

Clare