In case you’ve been living under a rock and didn’t know, last weekend there was a hurricane on the east coast. I was fortunate enough that I didn’t suffer any negative effects from the storm – except, perhaps, the 5 pounds I must have gained after stuffing my face nonstop for four days. Seriously, I ate SO MUCH. It’s not like I had anything else to do.

On Tuesday morning I decided that I needed to get myself back into diet mode, which meant that I needed to do a little sugar-free baking so that I’d have healthy snacks available for the rest of the week. After making three batches of my favorite sugar-free cookies, Coconut Meringues (omg I just realized I haven’t posted the recipe for that yet!), I decided to try something a bit more complicated. Since I had two packages of cream cheese in my fridge that expire on November 3rd, I knew that whatever I made would have to have cream cheese in it.

At first I wanted to make something with the remaining pumpkin puree that I had in my fridge, which was leftover from when I attempted to make Pumpkin Meringues…which was before I went to Europe…which was over three weeks ago…so yeah, after spending a good half hour googling “pumpkin cream cheese truvia,” I realized that I should probably check to make sure the pumpkin was still good.

It wasn’t. Whomp whomp.

But during the course of that google search I DID happen to stumble on a recipe for cream cheese brownies. It wasn’t really the recipe that caught my eye as much as it was the pictures – mouth watering.

I modified the recipes I found HERE and HERE. After a bit of tweaking to make a recipe that is not only diet-friendly but also uses Truvia and Cocoa Powder (which is what I had in my kitchen), this is what I came up with. I always get a little nervous when it comes to cooking with Truvia, because I’m afraid of the aftertaste that comes with using too much, but I brought these brownies to work and my non-dieting friends thought they were amazing. In fact, Di said she thinks it’s the best dessert I’ve made so far.

Enjoy!

Sugar-free, gluten free cream cheese brownies

For the brownies:

Wet Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup Coconut oil (melted)
• 3 Eggs (and 1 egg white – see instruction #4)
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla extract

Dry Ingredients:

• 1 cup Almond flour
• 1/2 cup Unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/4 cup Truvia
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp Sea salt

For the cream cheese part:

• 8 oz of cream cheese (one pack)
• 2 Tbs Truvia
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions:

1.Preheat the oven to 350. Line an 8×8 pan with aluminum foil and butter the foil. (I saw this instruction in one of the recipes I read. It made transferring the brownies to the cooling rack wayyy easier.)

2. Mix the wet ingredients in a bowl. (Note: I melted my coconut oil and then almost immediately poured it in with the eggs. This caused the eggs to cook a little bit, which you can see in the photo below. It didn’t affect the taste or anything, but that was probably a rookie cooking mistake.)

3. Add the dry ingredients and mix really well, then set aside.

4. In another mixing bowl, mix the ingredients for the cream cheese filling (I took the egg white that was left over from this and added it to the brownie mixture).

5. Add half the brownie batter to the pan, then a layer of the cream cheese mixture (next time I’ll make a thinner layer that is more evenly spread out), and then repeat until everything is in the pan.

6. Swirl!

That’s it! Just pop it in the oven for about 40 minutes (I say “about” because I did 45 minutes and they were a bit overcooked. Maybe start checking at 35 minutes just to be safe).