If you’re looking for an exciting twist on classic brownies, you’ve come to the right place. Today we want to share our delicious recipe for Vegan Ube Brownies with Filipino Purple Yam Spread.
They’re crunchy, colorful and 100% plant-based – we’re sure you’ll love them. So let us show you how to make them!
Ube spread is a sweet paste made from purple yams and is also called Ube Halaya in Filipino, meaning “purple yam”.
In our recipe, we use ube spread to replace butter and sugar in the vegan brownie batter.
You can find ube halaya at your local Asian grocery store or online. But you can also make it from scratch if you can find fresh ube or purple yams.
You can follow our easy homemade vegan ube butter recipe where we used ube, coconut milk, some coconut oil and a drizzle of maple syrup.
Whenever you use ube butter in recipes, you have to be careful not to mix it with baking powder or self-raising flour. Because the raising agents react with the color pigments in the ube.
And what happens is that it turns green! It’s happened to us with several brands of self-raising flour and baking powder, so we recommend trying yours first or skipping them altogether.
We didn’t use any leavening agents in these Ube brownies, so they come out a little flatter than classic brownies. But they will be just as tasty and gooey!
To keep these purple brownies vegan, we replaced the classic white chocolate with vegan white chocolate, available online or in health food stores. Feel free to use regular white chocolate if you prefer!
Also, we used glutinous rice flour instead of regular flour. Despite the name, glutinous rice flour is gluten-free and is ground for a type of Japanese glutinous rice called sticky rice mochigoma.
Also called mochigomeko or mochiko, this flour is used to make Japanese mochi balls.
The cool thing is that glutinous rice flour becomes super chewy and gooey when cooked with water or milk. So we used it in this recipe to make the no-butter Ube brownies soft and gooey.
You can find mochi flour at your local Asian grocery store or online, it’s super cheap, and you can make so many delicious gluten-free mochi recipes with it!
However, you can substitute regular flour if you prefer. Just follow our replacement tips at the bottom of the recipe page.
You can also find lots of delicious ideas on how to top these delicious vegan purple yam brownies after baking in our tips section.