Experimental Brownies

When I first heard of diabetes when I was younger, I had the brilliant idea to make cookies and brownies sweetened with fruit juice rather than sugar. I am very anti-artificial sweetener, so that is not an option (if you give me anything that has artificial sweetener, I can taste it, and it ruins the food for me). I completely forgot about this until about a week ago, when I was bemoaning the fact that I bought a half gallon of cherry juice for smoothies but it was too strong and so it was really just sitting around. Then I had a great idea: try to make brownies with juice, rather than sugar. The result was, well, interesting. The drawbacks might be a result of the recipe that I based it off of (and the additional modifications I made like switching from oil to butter). They had an odd texture, kind of what baked pudding might be like, rather than the fudgy, chewy, somewhat absorbant texture of brownies. They are slightly less sweet than most brownies, though I think they are sufficiently sweet, but their flavor was not as rich as most brownies. However, they did smell wonderful when baking. All in all, they are brownies, which means I eat them and like it, but they just don't have that fudgy wonderfulness that I love. However, I recently bought this cherry ice cream that is too sweet, but eating it with these brownies makes the ice cream actually taste okay.

Well, here's what I did:
Cherry Brownies:

1 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp. baking soda
3 cups cherry juice
1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
2 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp. vanilla
Dash of salt
1/2 chocolate chips (optional)
1 cup dried cherries (more or less)

Boil 2 cups cherry juice down to 1/2 cup. Stir cocoa and baking soda in bowl. Blend in 1/4 cup butter. Add boiling cherry juice and stir until mixture thickens. Stir in eggs and remaining butter. Stir until smooth. Add flour, vanilla and salt. At this point I added the remaining cup of cherry juice (I boiled it down slightly, mostly to help the butter melt). Blend completely. Add chocolate chips and dried cherries. Pour into lightly oiled 13x9 or 2-8" square pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes.