Recipe: Date-Sweetened Chocolate Frosting

[runpunkrun]

This date-sweetened chocolate frosting doesn't taste like your standard frosting with all the fat and refined sugar, but if you can't have that—or don't want it—this is a fair replacement. It's thick and smooth, spreads easily, and has the texture and feel you'd expect from frosting. It's great on brownies.

Ingredients:

100 grams pitted dates (~1/2 cup)
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
60 mL warm water (1/4 cup)
85 grams unsalted natural nut butter (1/3 cup)
25 grams cacao powder or unsweetened cocoa powder (1/4 cup)
1 pinch fine salt (optional)
15 mL oil (1 tablespoon, or sub water or nut butter)

( recipe )

Questions? Ask 'em!

Experimenting with @runpunkrun's lemon bars

[sonia]

As I commented to runpunkrun after I tried their Dairy-free Lemon Bar recipe, the bars taste good, but they differ from the unexpected canonical lemon bar in my head.

This personal canonical lemon bar has a crust more like shortbread, denser and softer at the same time, and more off-white. Filling creamier and less sweet. I have no idea where or when I had it, but the image of it is clear, complete with waxed paper under it from the bakery.

Things I have learned while experimenting with this recipe:

• I am an engineer, not a scientist. Obviously I should have changed one thing at a time and held everything else constant until I achieved what I wanted. What I did is use available ingredients and eyeball quantities and see how it turned out. At least I took some notes!
  
• My intuition about what to change works a lot better for the filling than the crust.
  
• The kind of oil matters.
  
• The kind of citrus matters.
  
• Buy an extra lemon. Not all lemons are equally juicy.
  
• My cat likes lemon bars. Who would have thought! I left a full pan cooling on the counter, and when I came back the top looked different... like it had been... licked???

( In detail... )

If anyone has suggestions on how to get the crust more the way I want it, I'm all ears! Any gluten-free baking experiments you want to share?