It has no flour.  None.  None at all.  Not wheat, not rice, not tapioca.  It’s held together with chocolate chips, eggs, garbanzo beans, and butter.   It rises with the help of a mere teaspoon of baking powder.  It is moist, flavorful, rich and reminds me of a brownie.  With over 5 grams of protein and 3 grams of fiber.  We will not mention the fat content.

It is Garbanzo Bean Chocolate Cake.

Ingredients:

1 1/2c chocolate chips
5TBS butter
1 19oz can garbanzo beans (chickpeas), drained and rinsed
4 eggs
3/4c sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla
frosting or 1 TBS powdered sugar

1.  Butter a 9″ cake pan, and dust with cocoa powder, or line a muffin tin with those muffin paper things… Muffin liners?  Muffin wrappers?  They do have an official name, right?

2.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

3.  Melt chocolate chips and butter in a small, thick saucepan on low heat, stirring occasionally.

4. Blend garbanzo beans and eggs in a food processor (or blender) til smooth.*  Add sugar and baking powder, mix til combined.  Add chocolate mixture and vanilla, mix til combined.  It does take a while to completely mix the chocolate with the bean mixture, but it is possible.

5. Pour batter into prepared pans.  If making cupcakes, fill tins until mostly filled, not 3/4 full, as is the normal procedure.  Bake a cake for 40 minutes, and cupcakes for approximately 23 minutes.

6. Either top with buttercream frosting, or dust with powdered sugar and enjoy!

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*I don’t have a very good processor, so I had some small chunks of beans that remained.  It didn’t bother anyone, however.  They were the right size and consistency that they could totally be passed off as a soft nut.  In the future, though, I will cook the beans until they are softer, in hopes that they blend til smooth.

Future variations I may just try:

This would be an excellent cupcake to fill.  I would love to try to make this into a Molten Lava creation.

Peanut butter would also taste amazing with this.  I want to either try a peanut butter flavored frosting, or a powdered-sugar-peanut butter filling.

Or I could pipe buttercream frosting into the cupcake and make my own Ding Dong.