Spiced Chocolate Brownies

In sheer excitement over my new found gluten free baking journey, I think I may have overdone it on stocking.  As I said before, as soon as I accepted the challenge, I ordered about 20lbs of different types of flours from Vitacost.com.  When they were delivered to my door, the cardboard box was a little disheveled and when you opened it, all of my flours were in individually packaged "bricks" stacked together.  As I unloaded my flours, my husband joked that it looked like (what he would imagine to be) a drug shipment.  We still laugh about this "delivery."  About two days after, I found the Namaste GF flour blend at Costco which I ended up loving and buying 4 bags of.  At this point, you'd think my pantry would be well-stocked, if not overly-stocked.  Well, let's not stop there.  Over a month ago, I was visiting my sister in California and I decided to stock up on bags of almond meal from Trader Joe's.  At this point, Austin's new TJ store had yet to open, so I wanted to make sure I had almond meal a plenty to get me through to the opening.

Little known fact though, I'd never used almond meal before so I'm not entirely sure why I thought I needed so much of it.  In any case, I had opened one bag to get a feel for texture, etc, and after a month of being in the fridge decided I'd better use it.  Insert Foodgawker search for almond meal recipes here.

This recipe was to showcase a specific brand of molasses.  I did not use that brand, I used what I had.  It also said to bake pan brownie-style, but I liked the idea of individual bites.   

These brownie bites taste a little bit like a mixture between a cake-y brownie or dense cake.  Take your pick.  Then I dressed them up with a shot of cinnamon chocolate buttercream and they were delicious!

I kind of want to experiment with the spices a little more.  Maybe add cloves and nutmeg?  More gingerbread style?

I basically followed this recipe that I found on Foodgawker with a few changes you can see below. Enjoy!

Mini-Spiced Chocolate Brownies
1 cup almond meal
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
3 tbsp cocoa powder
4 tbsp flour (I used Namaste GF blend)
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3 tbsp molasses
4 eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line mini-muffin pan and fill liners 2/3 full.  Bake for 10 minutes. Allow to cool then frost.

Spiced Chocolate Buttercream
1 stick butter, softened
3 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
1-2 tbsp milk

Cream sugar and powdered sugar until smooth.  Add cinnamon and vanilla extract. Add 1 tbsp milk at a time and whip until desired consistency.