Brielle's Avalon

Like brownies, only without the chocolate. A few weeks ago, when I brought brownies in to share, a coworker asked if I’d ever made blondies. I said no, but I’ve been meaning to so I’d make some soon. Now is soon enough. I basically used my brownie recipe without chocolate. This is something even kids can make and you can’t learn about the wonders of browned butter too young! It’s also a handy backup when you want to make brownies but you’re out of chocolate.

Melt a stick of butter in a saucepan. Let it cook til it bubbles, makes a froth and (finally) starts to brown. It’ll smell rich. Move the froth around until you see the milk solids below turn blonde-brown.

Remove from heat and add 1c sugar and 1 tsp vanilla. Mix well and let cool enough so the eggs don’t cook when you add them. Also, resist eating the mixture as it is at this point!

Add 2 eggs.

Tilt the pan and beat the eggs while slowly incorporating them into the sugar/butter. This makes sure there are no little bits of cooked, chewy egg that don’t quite mix in well.

Spray a cake pan (8×8) with oil or butter it with some soft butter.

Add 1/4 c flour to the square cake pan, coat the pan, knock the excess into the batter and add another 2/4 c flour to the batter.

Mix well and pour into the cake pan and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

These are fabulous with milk. Tea would be good, too, as would coffee. Yes, I took a nibble out of one before I took the picture. They’re just that good. I’m glad I browned the butter before mixing them all up, it really made a difference, the flavour becoming nutty and caramely. They’re chewy, too, so the yum goes on a bit.

Update 8/5/24: Rain chased me inside this morning so I decided to make blondies. Then, since anything worth doing is worth over-doing I made 3 batches. The 1st was with browned butter, the 2nd was with plain melted bitter and the 3rd was with brown sugar. I also realized that I should note that waiting for them to cool for about 10 or 15 minutes is a good thing so they don’t tear so much. Taste test on all was YUM! But the breakdown ended up:

Plain blondies were really yummy but yes, just plain and really good if you have nothing to compare them to.

Browned butter blondies were amazing. They had a richer, caramel like nutty favour.

The brown sugar blondies looked like I’d used chocolate chips or milk chocolate to make brownies (which I’ve done when I was out of Baker’s chocolate). They were also richer and tasted lightly of molasses, which is as expected since I used brown sugar.

Overall they’re all good. I think I’ll continue to make the browned butter blondies most. I guess the plain blondies would be a good vehicle for nuts, dried fruit, various flavours of chips (chocolate, butterscotch or peanut butter come immediately to mind) or even broken pieces of hard candy, since they’re a very neutral yum. This could take more experimenting in future.

9/2/24 Update

I can’t believe I didn’t take pictures of the comparative blondies I made a month ago with plain, melted butter, browned butter and brown sugar! Oh, darn, I need to make more! But I DID make blondies with browned butter last week. I was really happy with how the previous batches turned out but thought they could be even better. They were tasty and chewy but a little oily so in this latest batch I used 1c flour instead of 3/4c or 3/4c+2Tbsp. This worked. This batch was still tasty and chewy with lovely browned butter flavour but less oily. Now to work on my oatmeal cookies.

I made another batch this morning so I could photograph the brown sugar blondies. I think I’ll call them brunettes. I still had a couple pieces of blondie in the freezer (out of sight, out of mind) so I included one for direct comparison…and they’re yummy and get lonely and small so it’s best to have 2.