Date and Tahini Brownies

This recipe from Jill Dupleix, for Tahini and Date Brownies, made a fantastic chocolate cake, but I couldn't really relate it to the sort of thing I expect from a brownie recipe - it was far too light! Using puréed dates gave a lovely soft, but rich, texture, as well as cutting down on the amount of refined sugar and fat usually used in a recipe of this size, but did stop the brownies being dense and fudgy.

The amount of tahini in the recipe didn't make much of an impact on the flavour either. It's hard to tell unless I made the same recipe without the tahini, but we certainly didn't bite into a brownie and say 'Oooh! Good sesame flavour there!'

I puréed the dates with a stick blender, which was pretty hard going, as the purée was so thick. A blender attached to a food processor would probably given a smoother purée, but that wasn't possible for me. To those who profess to not like the flavour of dates, I would say, if you get a really smooth purée, you wouldn't even know the dates were there! However, I liked the odd little nubble of date left in my purée, just to remind me what was in the brownie.

If you are worried about the amount of refined sugar your family is eating, you would probably enjoy this recipe. I think it would make a good rich chocolate layer cake too - I'm pretty sure it would fit into 2 x 18cm (7") sandwich tins.

Tahini Brownies with a Sesame Praline Crust

I recently bought both tahini and sesame snaps for a cake recipe which I then decided not to make, so I had to think of another use for them. This recipe for tahini brownies with a sesame praline crust was the result. None of the sesame/tahini brownie recipes I could find online were quite what I was looking for - many used tahini to make dairy-free brownies and even more were so-called 'healthy' brownies, using raw ingredients or unusual grains instead of wheat flour. All I wanted was brownies with the flavour of sesame seeds!

In the end, I took inspiration from my recipe for brownies with a hazelnut praline crust, substituting tahini for some of the butter, and grinding the sesame snaps to make a praline topping. The results were very good - the brownies were very soft and gooey, and although the tahini flavour in the brownies wasn't very strong, the topping more than made up for this, adding a sweetened sesame flavour and crunch..

Ingredients
100g sesame snaps
90g butter
140g 70% plain chocolate
50g tahini
300g light muscovado sugar
3 large eggs
160g plain flour
3 tablespoons cocoa

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 180C and line a 20cm/8" square brownie tin with baking parchment.
Melt the butter and chocolate together in a large mixing bowl, over a pan of simmering water.
While this is happening, use a food processor or pestle and mortar to grind the sesame snaps to a fine praline crumb.
When the butter and chocolate has melted, stir in the tahini, followed by the sugar. Stir until smooth and evenly blended, then beat in the eggs, one at a time.
Sieve the flour and cocoa over the chocolate mix, and fold in.
Transfer the batter to the prepared tin and level the mixture, then sprinkle the sesame praline evenly over the batter.
Bake for 25-30 minutes, until a probe comes out with just a few damp crumbs sticking to it.
Cool before cutting into pieces of the desired size.

As this is the only chocolate baking I've done this month, and I was so pleased with the result, I'm sending this to August's We Should Cocoa link-up, hosted this month by Choclette at Tin and Thyme. As for July, the theme is 'Anything Goes'

Date and Tahini Slice

The randomly chosen letter for this month's AlphaBakes is T, although it's not that random, as we are nearing the end of the alphabet again, and T was one of only two letters left on this run-through. It's another strange letter when it comes to ingredients, as initial thoughts are that T must be easy, but then you look through recipe books to find that there aren't that many baking ingredients, or recipe names, beginning with T. Some of my books didn't have anything at all listed under T in the index, and others only had 'Triple....' or 'Toasted....' or similar descriptive words. Treacle cropped up quite a lot too, but I wasn't in the mood for anything too dark and sticky.

In the end, I decided to use Tahini, but it took me ages to find something that I really wanted to make, once I'd made that decision. I looked at cakes, cookies and flapjacks before I remembered that good old Australian word - slice - and came across this recipe, which seemed to use a good mix of  fruit and spices. It looked fairly healthy too - no added fat - until I read the nutritional information on the jar of tahini, and realised that sesame seeds contain nearly 60% fat, so using 185mls of tahini adds about 100g of fat to the recipe!

It's a simple recipe to follow, especially as metric weights are give alongside the cup measurements, but my cake batter was more like a cookie dough. I'm not sure whether this is down to different brands of ingredients being used, as well as desiccated coconut instead of shredded, or a fault in the recipe. I added a couple of tablespoons of milk, but it didn't make things much better. I gave the slice an extra 5 minutes baking time, to colour the coconut slightly, and be sure it was cooked through - a test at 20 minutes still looked a little damp.

The slice was pleasant to eat, and the flavours of dates, coconut and sesame seeds blended together well, but the amount of ground ginger used was hardly noticeable! The slice was more like a cookie in texture, but that made it a bit too dry for it's depth. Unfortunately, this wasn't something I'll be rushing to make again, although it might have worked better as a bar cookie, cooked in a larger baking tin, or even chilled and rolled into balls of dough to make conventional cookies.

AlphaBakes is co-hosted by Ros, at The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline at Caroline Makes, who is this month's host. The basic idea is to use the chosen letter as the first letter of a major ingredient or part of the name of the dish which is made eg T is for Tiger Bread, or in my case, T is for Tahini. Full rules can be found here.

Halva Flapjacks

This Dan Lepard recipe for flapjacks using tahini and condensed milk had a mixed reception. Hubs and I both really liked it, but I had made it primarily for FB's lunchboxes, and she didn't like it one bit! Which left us with a lot to eat, when we are both watching our waistlines, in a bid to stop further expansion. FB is not happy with lots of nuts, and, although I used mixed seeds instead of the nuts in the recipe, to her, the combination of tahini and the seeds tasted 'too nutty'.

The point of using the tahini, if you look at the link, is to reduce the amount of butter used, but there is still an awful lot of sugar in this recipe - so it's not for the calorie conscious! As usual, I made a few changes to the recipe, out of necessity - to replace the walnuts I used 50g each of pumpkin and sunflower seeds, and in place of 100g dates I used a mix of equal parts of dates, sultanas and cranberries. I used the full amount of oats mentioned and baked the flapjack in a 20cm tin, but think a slightly larger one would have been better - perhaps 22cm.

As I said, Hubs and I really liked this flapjack - the basic flavour was exactly like the sesame halva which my mother-in-law used to put in food parcels when she visited us*, with the added bonus of more textures and flavours from the oats, dried fruits and seeds. The fudginess produced by the tahini, sugars, butter and condensed milk makes these much different to most flapjacks

* My nominally Jewish MIL, with whom I had a very good relationship, was a fantastic cook and inspired me to cook properly when Hubs and I first married. She insisted on giving food parcels on visits - some delightful goodies like smoked salmon, salami, halva, biscuits and homemade cheesecake, but also nasty chocolates imported from Israel and manky over ripe fruit bought cheap at her local markets. We had to thank her nicely, wait until she had gone, and then ruthlessly throw a lot of the stuff away!