Tahini chocolate brownies

4 Feb 2020

Did you know you can use tahini in lots of sweet recipes? You can and it gives your baked goods a very rich flavour. I’ve been meaning to make a sweet tahini-based dessert in ages but I must admit I didn’t know what I was doing. Now having worked with tahini so much I finally decided to give it a go and make tahini brownies. It’s about taking all the nutty goodness and richness of this Middle Eastern sesame paste and pairing it with with cacao and cake ingredients and you get this very chocolatey and moist brownie that just tastes amazing.

Ages ago a friend of mine made tahini cookies which were lovely. Since then I was curious about making my own tahini recipe but never got to it. I also try to have as little food waste as possible so I often only start experimenting with new recipes after I had done a lot of research and was confident enough my recipe would work. And tahini is expensive so you don’t want to waste it. However, it’s all good now and I am so proud to finally have come up with my own recipe.

Admittedly, my recent visit to Israel also helped a lot. I was on this incredible vegan food tour where we met Daniel from Sweet Petite vegan. She held a vegan baking workshop for us, which I can only recommend. Out of the few treats we med we also used tahini in a pastry and it was sooo good! Btw, her Tel Aviv studio is air conditioned in case you also want to do this workshop , but are worried about (literally) baking in the warm Israeli weather (I was hehe, but fear not, you will stay cool).

For more delicious vegan recipe ideas, also check out my other videos on my youtube channel and subscribe here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/exceedinglyvegan

These are actually my first chocolate brownies I've ever made, so i was even more happy about the results. I basically sat on my sofa last Saturday while Netflix and chilling and the idea of a tahini brownie recipe all of a sudden came to me. So I switched off the tv, went through my kitchen cupboards (luckily I had all ingredients at home) and started work on the first batch. And it worked almost perfectly. The final recipe has a few small changes to make it taste even better and I almost added almonds as well but then I touhght that might be a bit too much, because I didn't want to overpower the nuttiness of the tahini.

And they only take 25-30 min to bake - it depends on your tahini though. If you get a more runny one then it will probably take 30 minutes and if you get a more pasty one then around 25 min. But do the tooth pick test just in case (stick it into the brownies and you get dough sticking to your toothpick then you need to keep it in the oven for a little longer).

Vegan Israel baking working workshop Tel Aviv

Some background info: this photo was taking by our vegan food tour photographer Amir Menahem at our baking workshop with Daniel from https://www.sweetpetite.store/. Here I made my first tahini dessert - yeast cake roses. Admittedly the name doesn't do them justice because they were sooo good! And this was my first experience working with tahini on sweet recipes. By the way you can check our my top 10 vegan things to do list in this post if you are curious.

Here they are - yeast cake roses filled with tahini, my first sweet tahini experience and the inspiration for this recipe. WHAT A TREAT!

But back to my tahini brownies! I was so happy about the texture, They held together really well and were moist and rich in chocolatey flavour.

easy chocolate brownie recipe from exceedingly vegan

Luckily I still have half a tray of these tahini brownies left while writing this post (I always get so hungry posting on my blog haha - well, at least I love my own food). So I will reward myself a bit later ;-)

TAHINI BROWNIES INGREDIENTS (10-12 brownies):

Step 1: ingredients:

250g flour
220g brown sugar
70g cacao
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Step 2: wet ingredients:

250ml plant-based milk
180g tahini
50 ml sunflower oil
4 tbsp lemon juice
4 tsp vanilla extract

Step 3:

Heat-proof glass dish
Parchment paper

Make cooking easier with my ingredient converter: Click to open

LIQUID INGREDIENT CONVERTER

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METHOD:

Preheat your oven to 180C (360F).

Step 1:

Mix together all dry ingredients.

You can use a large bowl and a spatula or a hand mixer if you have one. But I wanted to use as little equipment as possible to show how easy making this cake is. Make sure there are no lumps. By the way, these brownies are well balanced in terms of sweetness. If you like your desserts to be very sweet I would recommend you add 250g of brown sugar instead of 220g.

Step 2:

Mix together all wet ingredients for 1 minute until the tahini paste has combined well with all other ingredients and you get a smooth consistency.

Now mix both wet and dry ingredients together until you get a smooth batter. Remember, there should be no lumps.

Step3:

Cover a heat proof glass dish (mine was 30 x 22.5cm) with parchment paper.

Then pour the batter into the dish and even out with a spatula or spoon.

Bake in your oven for 25-30 minutes.

Let cool down and then sprinkle with some icing sugar or smother with chocolate spread.

Enjoy!

And if you love vegan baking then you must try my super easy vegan blueberry cake. It really couldn’t be easier to make your own amazing tasting cake!