It’s that time again! Housewife-y Cooking 2.0 is back with flourless brownies from our favorite health food store, Whole Foods. I’ve heard about people using the secret ingredient before to make brownies, but I’ve always been skeptical. Well color me convinced because these turned out beautifully!

What’s the secret ingredient, you might be wondering?

Beans! Black beans to be exact.

I started out by assembling the ingredients:

Black beans, cocoa powder, agave nectar (I substituted some of this instead of using all sugar), sugar, salt, chocolate chips, walnuts, butter, and eggs. Sorry about that half eaten banana sitting there. Guess that’s not too appetizing.

Moving on. The first step was to blend the beans, cocoa powder, agave, sugar, salt, butter and eggs in a food processor. Well crap. First obstacle. I don’t even have a food processor. When we got married three years ago we registered for one, and actually received three as gifts. Well I ended up returning all three of them, getting the cash and buying a vacuum. (Sorry if you were one of the food processor givers. If it helps I truly love my vacuum.)

So no food processor, so I used the blender instead. All of the ingredients together looked a little disgusting, I must say.

But they mixed up nicely.

See, who needs a food processor? Once the blending was finished, I used the amazing chopper to chop up the walnuts.

Once the walnuts are chopped, fold them into the batter, along with the chocolate chips.

Mix all together and pour into an 8 inch pan.

Bake at 350 for 30-35 min (I ended up doing 32:30 just for fun).

And plate!

Guess I still need to work on my plating technique, but I think you can tell how gooey and dense they are. And they actually really really good. I cut this pan into 20 small pieces. They are small brownie bites, but I think they’re a perfect size because the flavor is so intense. Each piece is about 100 calories, so these flourless brownies make for a nice little treat. I’ll definitely be making these again!