Baking with Coconut Flour: 3 - More Brownies

Although I was pleased enough with the previous batch of brownies I made with coconut flour, they were a little on the cakey side, rather than dense and chewy. The brownies I usually make are dense and chewy - my definition of a perfect brownie - so I wanted to see if I could adapt that recipe to use coconut flour.

My usual recipe contains both melted chocolate and cocoa for great depth of flavour, and butter. I decided to make my trial recipe dairy-free, as well as using the gluten-free coconut flour. To achieve this I used coconut oil rather than a vegetable oil. Although it is a more saturated fat, I like the results of using coconut oil better than using vegetable oils - it's similar to the results when baking with butter.

I was working mainly on instinct, combined with my limited experience of cooking with coconut flour, as well as what I'd read about baking with coconut flour. This is how I changed the recipe:

Original:                                                                   Coconut flour recipe:
140g plain chocolate (around 70%)                            140g plain chocolate
140g butter                                                                100g coconut oil
300g light muscovado sugar                                       300g light muscovado sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract                                        2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 large eggs                                                               4 large eggs
160g plain flour                                                         40g coconut flour
3 tablespoons cocoa                                                  3 tablespoons cocoa

(If it's important that the recipe is completely dairy-free, then remember to check the ingredients in the chocolate that you choose.)

In both cases the method was the same - melt the chocolate and fat together, stir in the sugar and vanilla extract, then beat the eggs in, one at a time. Sift in the flour and cocoa, and fold into the wet mixture. Spread into a 8 x 8" square tin, lined with baking parchment, and bake at 180C. The original recipe takes 30-35 minutes to bake, depending on how gooey you like your brownies, but the coconut flour brownies were cooked in 25 minutes.  Cut into bars or squares while still warm but cool completely before removing from tin.

I was really pleased with these  brownies. Using melted chocolate and more sugar made the brownies moister and more chewy (less cakey) than the first recipe, as I'd hoped, although they were still quite light. I think this lightness is a feature of any baking with coconut flour as you need so little compared with wheat flour. The use of coconut oil, as well as coconut flour, added a touch more coconut to the flavour, but nothing too overwhelming.

What made it more pleasing to adapt my own recipe successfully was that only a few days previously I'd tried an online recipe for chocolate chip bars with coconut flour and had produced something so disastrous that it had to be thrown away - and things have to be really awful before I bin them, as I'm reluctant to waste food if it's at all edible!