Raspberry Chickpea Blondies {Vegan, GF, Sugar-Free}

Just like their dark siblings, classic blondies are not vegan.

That’s because they contain at least butter and eggs.

To make brownies vegan, you need to find a suitable substitute for these animal products. All brownies on this website are vegan and we used different techniques for each of them. Check them out here if you’re looking for inspiration!

You can also check out our other FAQs below as we talk more about how to make a diet friendly brownie.

Take a classic brownie recipe and look at the ratios of the ingredients used. You would see that traditional brownies broadly consist of:

More than 52% consists only of butter and sugar! Not quite the picture of health, is it? Luckily for the brownie-loving world, unhealthy brownies aren’t the only ones that are so damn delicious. There are plenty of healthy variations (some vegan and gluten-free, too) that are just as gooey, chubby, and irresistible as the classic treat.

Take a look at our current list of our healthy brownies, for example:

All of these brownies are vegan, gluten-free, and made with no added sugar, and have a much better nutritional profile. What’s her secret? What Makes a Healthy Brownie? Here’s a list of tips and tricks you can follow to bake healthy brownies and blondies yourself.

• Replace butter with low-fat ingredients that act as a binder.

• Instead of white sugar, use naturally sweet ingredients like fruit.

• Use dark chocolate (90%+) instead of other types.

• Add superfoods or nutrient-dense ingredients to your brownie batter.

• [Optional – for Gluten-Free brownies or low-carb brownies] Swap wheat flour for gluten-free or low-carb substitutes like mixed chickpeas, cauliflower, black beans, etc.

In the following FAQs we will talk more about each of these points.

Butter makes brownies moist. That’s true, but you can get the same result without using butter or other dairy products. You can even get incredibly gooey brownies with the most unexpected ingredients, like cauliflower.

What we need is to find a combination of ingredients that act like butter, bind like butter, but contain none of the bad.

We recently came up with two brownie recipes using rather unconventional ingredients: cauliflower and zucchini.

None of them have dairy or refined butter substitutes like margarine. However, they are insanely gooey and fudgy. How really, really fudgy! You are wonderful.

These are the two things we did to soften these no-butter brownies:

• We used a little nut spread (almonds or peanuts or other nut-based spreads) to replace the binding properties of butter.

• We kept the batter runnier than the classic recipe and chilled the brownie sheet in the fridge for up to an hour before slicing.

This last tip is kind of the secret Here. The ingredients will bind and harden naturally over time in a cool place. Starting with a softer, more runny batter will give you a fiddlier consistency after a little nap in the fridge. The result? A more fiddly brownie that doesn’t use any unhealthy ingredients, to be fair.

Do you want to practice it yourself? Follow our cauliflower brownies recipe, then adapt the same technique to other plant-based ingredients you like.

Preparing healthy brownies or blondies without any sugar is very easy.

You can do this by replacing white sugar with naturally sweet ingredients like fruit, or with natural sweeteners like erythritol.

We’ve found that pitted dates and bananas make great sugar alternatives in brownies. They also mix into a dense and creamy paste, helping to get that fluffy texture we all love about this dessert.

Erythritol and Stevia are natural sweeteners that are perfect for making diabetes-friendly sweet treats because they’re zero sugar and zero calories.

The classic blondie recipe contains wheat flour and is therefore not suitable for those on a gluten-free diet.

Oatmeal is a great alternative to regular flour when making brownies. You can simply grind them into flour by pulsing the oatmeal in your food processor. Oats also help in getting a denser and juicier brownie batter.

Other gluten-free options you can try are coconut flour, rice flour, or almond flour.

You can even omit the flour altogether, like we did with our zucchini brownies, for a super fluffy texture. You can also use starchy chickpeas, like we did with our chickpea blondies, or opt for black beans.