When You Can't Eat Out: Black Beans and Avacados...What Can You Make with That?

Decadent desserts abound in Orlando: The Dessert Lady, Jeremiah's Italian Ice, Sweet! by Good Golly Miss Holly, Blue Bird Bake Shop (I need to visit this place!), etc. Sometimes, however, time and money prevents indulging in conventional sweets. Not to mention that the ingredients can be questionable. To fix the dessert need, homemade concoctions can do just the trick.

At a New Year's Eve party we attended, a mountainous dessert of brownies, chocolate pudding, cool whip, and Heath Bar crumbled on top drew my mom's attention and one she wanted to replicate. There is a catch...See, we don't eat typical sweets; our family tries to make cookies, cakes, ice cream even, with alternative sweeteners such as honey, coconut palm sugar, or stevia. It can take time to develop a taste for these compared to white sugar but once done, you really don't miss the other. Thus, to make the dessert seen at the New Year's Eve party, we took an alternative route which included black beans and avocados.

To make the cake part, we made chocolate cake using 1/2 cup of honey instead of a white sugar and rather than using flour, we used black beans which makes the end result very moist. It isn't as sweet as typical chocolate cake but it is just as satisfying and high in nutrients!

For the chocolate pudding, we employed avocados. Yes, avocados! We added a little sweetener and cocoa powder which makes it almost a chocolate mousse.

Finally, instead of cool whip, we made homemade whipped cream. This is simply the only way to indulge in whipped cream and it is way easier than pie; the air can stuff can't compare (see recipe below).

For the Heath Bar, I made a creamy peanut butter filling which I spread and froze in a pan. My mom made a chocolate frosting/toffee for the top that we aren't sure how we got to the consistency and texture that we did so that could make replicating it difficult. We placed the entire thing in the freezer to get good and hard.

We layered the concoction in a clear dish so we could get a good look at our creation. Cake, then the pudding, then the whipped cream, then the peanut butter candy; we repeated this one more time. Once completed, we set it in the freezer for about a half hour to set. The end result was a rich, healthy, dessert which hit the spot! Enough of my opinion, a picture speaks a thousand words and I have a few!

Not bad for black beans and avocados!

Whipped Cream Recipe:

Place a medium bowl and beaters in the freezer until completely chilled.

1 cup heavy whipping cream

2 tablespoons honey

1 teaspoon vanilla

Place all the ingredients in the cold bowl and beat on high until stiff peaks form; you can test this pay pulling the beaters up and creating peaks. If they flop over, then you need to beat a bit longer. You don't want to over mix the whipping cream.