Sweet Infinity: A special brownie in honour of a special lady

Nigella Lawson is acting as judge on Masterchef Australia tonight! I had originally planned to bake a cake or something in honour of her appearance, but with exams looming and everything, I cickened out and went the store-bought route.

Well, if you call a $6 brownie from Sweet Infinity in The Strand Arcade "store-bought"!

I must have walked past the window of Sweet Infinity five times this afternoon before I gave up and just went in. It was the window display of brownies. There was literally a pyramid of them, cocoa-dusted chocolate bricks stacked sky-high. So in I went, resigned to the fact that this was the day that I will finally get my hands on Leanne Beck's renowned handiwork.

There was one customer before me, a middle-aged woman, dressed in full business attire. Take a guess on what she ordered :D That's right, it was the darned brownie. And, when I asked for one too, the lady behind the counter said, hilariously, "that's my afternoon...fetching brownies". Sounds like a fabulous way to spend one's afternoon!

I had a hard time waiting until after dinner to dig into the brownie. But I succeeded in the end, and the reward was all the sweeter for it. Served with a scoop of creamy Connoisseur vanilla ice cream, the brownie simply made my eyes roll to the back of my head...Nigella style! :D

And like Nigella once said, "everything in moderation...including moderation!" As much as I would have liked to gobble down the whole, giant slab, I knew I'd enjoy it more if I spread it out over the next few days. So into the freezer it went, to be microwaved and served with more ice cream tomorrow night, and the one after that...

And just in case anyone should think to lay their little, greedy paws on my brownie:

Sweet Infinity

Strand Store

Shop 18 Strand Arcade,
412 - 418 George Street Sydney
Phone: 02 9231 0472
Website: http://www.sweetinfinity.com.au/

Opening Hours

8:00 am to 5:30 pm Monday to Friday
8:00 am to 7:00 pm Thursday
9:00 am to 5:30 pm Saturday
11:00 am to 4:00 pm Sunday

(Kidney) Bean Brownies

Just so we're clear on this: there are no actual kidneys in these "brownies". It was simply a matter of having to use canned red kidney beans instead of the ubiquitous black beans called for in all the bean brownie recipes I found. Here in Australia, black beans, canned or not, don't seem to be nearly as easily found in grocery stores as they are in the States.

A caveat: Although they're called brownies and indeed look like brownies, they're...not brownies. They don't taste like your traditional brownies, and if you're looking for a sugar/butter/chocolate hit, you're probably better off whipping up a batch of real ones (or getting your keen baker friend to do it for you :D)

Having said that, these are still quite tasty, and strangely addictive once you get used to the taste. The texture kinda reminds me of the bean cakes you can get in Japan.

Without further ado, I present you with...red bean brownies!

 

INGREDIENTS (Makes 9 servings)

• 427g canned Red Kidney Beans (no added salt)
• 200g Banana (without peel)
• 50g Dark Agave Nectar
• 30g Traditional Rolled Oats
• 21g Nestle Baking Cocoa
• 1g Cinnamon, ground
• 4g Vanilla Extract

METHOD

Preheat oven to 180 degrees, or 160 degrees for fan-forced oven.

1) First, you gotta get those kidney beans mashed! I used my newly acquired blender for this part, but you could go at it the hard way with a fork.

 

You're done with the mashing once the beans reach the consistency of a smooth paste:

 

2) Next, mash up your bananas! My new blender once again came in handy.

I find that whipping it with some sort of electrical appliance gives the bananas a more aerated, marshmallowy texture than mashing it up with a fork, which in turn translates into a more fudgey finished product. But as long as there aren't any visible chunks of banana, you're doing fine :D

3) Add whipped banana to the red bean paste. Add in the cocoa powder, agave nectar, ground cinnamon and vanilla essence. Incorporate thoroughly.

 
 

4) Add the rolled oats, and mix again.

5) At this stage, I put the whole mixture back into the blender in order to not have visible oat flakes in the final brownie batter. In hind sight, I realised that I could have just blitzed the oats into a fine powder instead, and mixed that in with the batter by hand. In fact, that would have been the smarter (and safer) thing to do, because my blender was smoking slightly from getting all over-heated.

 

6) Line a pan with baking paper, and pour batter in. I had to improvise and make my rectangular pan into a square one, since I didn't want the batter to spread too thinly.

 
 

7) Pop it into the oven and bake for around 25-30 minutes. Brownies are done when the top is nicely cracked like this:

8) Allow to cool, cut into pieces and then enjoy! Some say they're better after a few hours of refrigeration, but I found they taste really yummy either way.

 

One friend has said to me on many occasions that there are foods that you just know are doing you all sorts of good as they're going down the gullet. This is one of them. It doesn't taste like decadence in a square, but at only (roughly) 116 calories per serving, it's a 'brownie' that one can eat on a day to day basis :D