‘Deceptively Delicious’ Brownies: Good or Gross?

I’ve had a copy of Jessica Seinfeld’s “Deceptively Delicious” cookbook for months now and haven’t made anything from it so I decided it was finally time to try something out. What better way to start than with dessert — here come the brownies.

Seinfeld’s book is based on adding vegetable and fruit purees into regular recipes to add nutrition to every meal. The brownie recipe calls for carrot and spinach purees. Stay with me here, folks.

It all starts with the raw food. I chopped the carrots into 3-inch pieces then zapped them in the microwave.

Put these suckers in your processor of choice. I tried them all (as seen below).

This is what my kitchen looked like after I did the pureeing.

The bullet-like machine I have didn’t quite give me the consistency and it was waking up the baby, so I switched to the food processor (pictured on right.) That only chopped the carrots, no puree, so I moved on to the third kitchen appliance — the blender. It didn’t quite do it either, but I’d run out of machines to try so I added more water and blended the heck out of those carrots. I wonder if I had microwaved them longer if that would’ve helped.

They finally became smooth enough that I stopped blending and measured out a 1/2 cup.

I pureed way too many carrots so I put a 1/2 cup each in separate plastic zip top bags to freeze and use in future reciopes — and I gave some to the baby. Man, did I feel like super mom after that. Nothing like the feeling of giving your baby true homemade baby food. Gotta do that again.

Next came the spinach. I used frozen spinach and the blender. It was still a bit stringy, but I don’t think I could have blended it anymore so I stopped when it looked like this.

Here they are together: spinach and carrots. Don’t they look beautiful together? I love the colors.

Next came the butter, cocoa powder and melted chocolate. I also had to add flour, baking powder and salt to this.

Once it was all mixed together you can kind of see the spinach, but honestly I didn’t notice it until I looked at this photo. This went into the oven and I said a little cooking prayer.

OK, these look decent. They look like brownies. I cut them up and let them cool. In her book, Seinfeld says to not eat them until they are totally cooled otherwise you’ll be able to taste the spinach. So, what do I do? I cut a small, warm piece and taste it. Yep, you can taste the spinach.

Wait until they cool and they taste fine. The chocolate overwhelms the other flavors. My only complaint is the texture isn’t the best for a brownie. The best way to describe it is heavy. But not too much.

It looks delicious. It tastes good.

My son loved it. He had one of these everyday until they were gone. Granted, if they had been a traditional brownie they wouldn’t have lasted in our house as long as these did, but I have to say that when my son asked for a brownie I actually felt OK about him having one of these. After physically putting the veggies in there I know that he is getting something healthy while, at the same time, getting a treat. It’s a win-win.

I think next time I’ll try the Sneaky Chef’s version of brownies with blueberries, spinach and applesauce.

Related:

• Get the “Deceptively Delicious” brownie recipe.
• Get more recipes from the book.
• Sneaky Chef’s brownie recipe.