If I told you that some of the best brownies I’ve ever made were gluten-free and didn’t actually contain any chocolate, would you believe me? (I wouldn’t lie about something like this, I promise.)
Let me explain. A few weeks ago, I came across Alice Medrich’s Cocoa Brownies on Food52, which are made with a hefty dose of cocoa powder rather than chocolate – helpful because if there is chocolate in the house, I usually eat it before I can bake with it, whereas cocoa powder is much less pleasant to eat straight. Then I saw Christina’s red wine cupcake version of that dynamite quinoa chocolate cake (seriously, if you haven’t made it yet, what are you waiting for?), and I started wondering if you could make brownies with quinoa, being that it makes such a rad chocolate cake. I turned to the Google machine and found that yes, it’s been done, but that all the recipes very closely resemble the quinoa chocolate cake rather than a true brownie, and while the quinoa chocolate cake is an awesome cake in its own right, it’s not a brownie. So I set off to experiment with Alice’s cocoa brownie recipe and some cooked quinoa to come up with my own formula.
…
…
Of all the things I imagined making with a sourdough starter, brownies were not one of them. This month 
These have been on my “to-make” list for a long time since first seeing the recipe on 
…
I am currently navigating my way through some silly government bureaucracy, and if you’ve ever had the misfortune to be in that position, you probably know that (regardless of which government you’re dealing with) it can seem like an endless string of hoop jumping, inordinately long waiting periods, and many frustrating encounters with a wretched automated phone menu….