– An Easy Spread –

Brownie or dirt? You decide!

When I went to Penn State, my boyfriend’s best friend and roommate, Paul, told me that my homemade brownies looked like the “cracked, desolate, soil of hell.”  This didn’t bother me because I didn’t care what they looked like.  They were sweetened with stevia and made without sugar, gluten, soy, or corn.  It was more important to me that they were hypoallergenic than looking pretty for my boyfriend’s roommates.

Paul had no desire to sample my brownies, but to be polite, he took a bite.  After jittering around in taste bud remorse and rinsing his mouth out with water straight from the kitchen faucet, Paul lay down on the floor, and took a lick of carpet.  I’ll never forget what he said—“The carpet tastes better!”

My homemade brownies received similar comments from most of my college friends who tried them.   No one liked them.  Even my boyfriend wasn’t afraid to tell me how abhorrent these brownies were.   It’s difficult to make a brownie taste normal when stevia is the only option you have to sweeten them!

It wasn’t until I went to medical school in Seattle where I found hippie foodies that loved my brownies.  They understood them.   My new classmates were familiar with food allergies, and eating weird health food was part of their religion.

In college, I was diagnosed with Interstitial Cystitis.  After seeing several different doctors and taking prescription drugs with distressing side effects, I finally saw an allergist.  The allergist had me remove all gluten, soy, corn, white sugar, vinegar, alcohol, and all natural and artificial sweeteners from my diet.  Because the list of food restrictions was too much of a mouthful to verbalize, I began referring to my diet as “archerfriendly.” And yes—eating archerfriendly has brought a lot of physical healing to my body.

My body couldn’t handle anything sweet.  One of the ways my body would let me know how much it hated sugar was by giving me bladder spasms that felt like my bladder was contracting on razor blades.  Sugar bothered my bladder and so did all the other natural sweeteners.  Honey was out.  Maple syrup was out.  Agave nectar was out.  Sucanat was out.  I also had to significantly restrict fruit.  This left me with very little options to sweeten my food.

Stevia was the only natural sweetener that didn’t give me bladder spasms.  This zero calorie sweetener comes straight from the plant Stevia rebaudiana. You can buy stevia as a clear liquid, a green powder, or a white powder.  Stevia is also sold in travel packets, which might look cuter in formal settings, but this form usually has additional ingredients.  The liquid form of stevia is most palatable for non-stevia addicts.  It’s more expensive, but you only need a few drops of it to sweeten a beverage.  Some companies even make flavored liquid stevia (vanilla, orange, root beer, etc.).  The green powder is the ground, dried up leaf.  Steviosides are extracted from the leaf to make the white powder.  A stevioside is the name of the specific compound in the plant’s leaf that makes it taste sweet.  In Medical Herbalism, renowned herbalist David Hoffmann says that stevia is about 300 times sweeter than sugar!

I quickly grew obsessed with stevia, especially since I was a former sugar junkie.  Stevia offered me the sweet taste I craved.  I carried a stevia bottle (containing the white powdered version) with me everywhere I went.  When I went to school, the stevia bottle was in my backpack.  When I went out, the stevia bottle was in my purse.  There were some situations where my stevia bottle looked uncouth, as I embarrassingly pulled it out of my purse at weddings and formal dinners.  Too bad I didn’t have a snazzy belt holster to attach it to my hip.

A question for future stevia samplers:  If stevia is 300 times sweeter than sugar, how much should you sample on your finger?  Answer:  a microscopic, can-hardly-see-any powder on your finger type of sample.  This is also how much you would need to sweeten a hot drink.  Just a dusting.

Since my stevia bottle went wherever I did, people always asked me what that “white powdery stuff” was that I cautiously tapped into my hot drinks.  I would give them the stevia spiel and let them have a taste.  I always warned the curious taste tester that, “You hardly need any to taste it,” but this warning wasn’t heeded by most.  Their finger pad would be covered in stevia and wiped across their tongue before they registered my warning that they really only needed a speckle.  This behavior almost always produced the same facial reaction—a caustic, repulsing cringe.  Its only when people listened to my instructions before they dipped their finger into the white dust that they said it was “ok.”

The only problem with stevia is that it’s almost 300 times smaller than sugar!!  It does not equally substitute in recipes for sugar.  When using stevia instead of sugar in baked goods, the recipe loses a lot of the bulk that the sugar provides.  To replace the sugar volume, I started substituting in baby food sweet potatoes.  Sweet potatoes were archerfriendly and they worked!

Courtesy of Amazon.com

I started baking archerfriendly brownies by sweetening them with sweet potatoes and stevia.  I used Special Dark Hershey’s Cocoa as my flour base.  This produced an exceedingly dark, rich, chocolaty product, which is why others attributed my brownies to the appearance of sun-baked dirt.  These brownies were the next best thing to heaven to me.   They became a staple food in my college diet.  I brought them to class with me. I ate them for dessert.  I packed them for road trips.  I even froze them in individually wrapped packages so I could have a quick snack during busy study weeks.

When I recently phoned Paul to ask him if he remembered his response after trying my archerfriendly brownies in college, he repeated what he told me in college—“ I reacted like anyone would have reacted if they had eaten the cracked, desolate soil of hell.”

Stevia Brownies

• 1.5 cups cocoa powder
• ½ cup + 2 Tablespoons Dutch processed cocoa powder
• ½ cup quinoa flour
• ½ cup soy & dairy free protein powder
• 4 scoops stevia (45 mg per scoop)
• 1.5 cups butter (3 sticks)
• 2 jars baby food sweet potatoes (6 oz. jars)
• 4 eggs
• ¾ cup lite coconut milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°.
2. Grease a 9” x 11” glass baking dish and set aside.
3. Mix dry ingredients together.
4. In a separate bowl, blend together the butter, sweet potatoes, eggs, coconut milk, and vanilla.
5. Combine wet and dry ingredients.  Stir thoroughly.
6. Pour into greased 9” x 11” glass baking dish.
7. Bake at 350° for 30-40 minutes.  To test for doneness, insert a toothpick into the center of the brownies.  Brownies are done if the toothpick comes out clean.

Notes

• Most stevia bottles come with a 45 mg plastic scoop inside.  This is the scoop I used to measure the stevia.
• You can omit the Dutch processed cocoa powder and use 2 cups of regular cocoa powder instead of 1.5 cups.  The Dutch processed cocoa adds a sweeter flavor to the brownies.
• The baby food sweet potato jars are 6 ounces by weight.
• Tastes best when refrigerated.

Have your own food allergies story? Tried stevia brownies? Have a question for Archer? Comment below!

Guest blogger Archer Atkins is a naturopathic medical student at Bastyr University in Seattle, WA.  She recently started a food and health blog at www.ArcherFriendly.com.