Neuroscience

Chocolate Mooncakes (Gluten-free). Or, Recipes on the Blog!

I've been cooking & posting photos / recipes to my Facebook page for a while now. That turns out to be satisfying because my friends post comments ... but ultimately is unsatisfying because I can't easily refer people to my baked kale recipe or my spicy Thai slaw recipe.

I got a suggestion (or two) to start a blog ... but hey, I already have a blog, and it's not being used. So ... I'm planning to post some recipes here, in addition to the occasional post about teaching or librarianing or cognitive sciencing.

Chocolate Mooncakes

First up: Chocolate Mooncakes (Gluten Free). or, Black bean, gluten-free brownies. I wanted a relatively healthy and wheat-free baked good to take to various holiday events -- but it had to taste good first. So I scoured the interwebs for black bean brownie recipes & settled on Eat Good 4 Life: Dark chocolate and black bean brownies.

The recipe calls for many of the usual brownie ingredients, such as eggs, sugar, and vanilla.

Variations: I am not a big brownie baker, so I was less familiar with the chocolate aspect. The recipe calls for dark cocoa powder, but since I didn't know if I was going to like these (and thus make them again), I didn't want to buy a lot of cocoa powder. So I bought a single-serving packet of sipping cocoa. I used Whole Foods semi-sweet chocolate chips for the toppings. I also substituted (and toasted) pecans instead of chopped walnuts, just because I'm in the south.

I was flummoxed at the notion of buying instant coffee -- all I could think of was Sanka, and I didn't know where I might big a jar of Sanka these days. While I didn't look hard, I still didn't find any instant coffee, and so I thought I would do without. Then I remembered that Starbucks is making instant coffee, so I bought a three-pack of their coffee-flavored instant coffee. (I didn't buy their flavored mochas, nor their Christmas blend.)

The cool thing about this recipe, and this is not a variation, but is, imho, A Good Thing, is the use of a can of black beans instead of flour. The texture is not quite brownie-like, but as my friend Tomasa said, is more like a Chinese mooncake. Actually, according to Wikipedia, this is nothing like a typical Chinese mooncake, but it's more like a mooncake than a brownie, so I'm sticking with the name.

If you're gluten-free, or just want to try a brownie variation, I recommend these.

- Chocolate Brains
Chocolate brains, with or without cherries inside. Or if you don't want to shop around online, make your own. Chocolate contains mood boosting chemicals like anandamide, tryptophan, and phenylethylamine. These are also a good Valentine's gift...

- Scrumptious Skulls
Image from Cakehead Loves Evil. Marina Malvada is a painter, musician and chocolatier who makes anatomically correct skulls out of the finest imported chocolate. How does she get them to look so realistic? The confections are cast from an actual human...

- Hershey-funded Study Finds Chocolate May Be Good For You
In the tradition of industry-sponsored studies (i.e., Wrigley-Funded Study Finds Chewing Gum May Help Reduce Stress), a press release from the Hershey Company informs us that: Resveratrol, red wine compound linked to health, also found in dark chocolate...

- Wake Up And Smell The Coffee?
It seems to work for rats... Wonderful World of Rats Is a sniff as good as a cup of coffee? 11 June 2008 From New Scientist Print Edition. DRINKING a cup of coffee can wake you up, but perhaps just a whiff of Java is enough to reverse the effects of...

- Fresh Cooked Edamame
As I was perusing the gorgeous displays at the Durham Farmer's Market today, I lingered at Piedmont Biofarm ... and discovered some fresh edamame. I've made it before, but this time I decided to research recipes to see if I could recreate the...

Neuroscience