Week 13: Blondies

Blondies

We do a lot of baking at our house and as difficult as it is to believe, we have never made “blondies”. These were put on the list by Aubrey. We had them on our list for later in the year but when we made plans to visit family this weekend, we moved the blondies because we could make them on Thursday and they would travel really well.

Oddly enough, I didn’t really even know exactly what a blondie was and had never given a thought to the significance of the name. I just thought of them as chocolate chip cookie bars without the chocolate chips…I think? It didn’t take much research to find out a blondie is a brownie without the cocoa powder. Well, duh, right? 😉

Unfortunately I don’t have a family recipe or even any family memories that revolve around such a simple and ubiquitous dessert. We had to look for a recipe and weren’t too surprised to find as many variations of blondie recipes as there are brownie ones. Again, as common as this dessert is, we didn’t know which recipe would give us the “best” blondie so we went with a tested cook book. The recipe we used for this week was from the Cook’s Illustrated Baking book.

We figured we could make a few substitutions without any issues. We used white whole wheat flour instead of all purpose, Swerve brown sugar for regular brown sugar, and we chose pecans instead of walnuts. Aubrey decided that blondies shouldn’t have any brown in them so we chose to use the white chips but only 3 oz not 6.

Ingredients

• 1 cup pecans or walnuts (4 ounces)
• 1 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour (7 1/2 ounces)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon table salt
• 12 tablespoons unsalted butter ( 1 1/2 sticks), melted and cooled
• 1 ½ cups packed light brown sugar (10 1/2 ounces)
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 4 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 6 ounces white chocolate chips (1 cup) or chopped bar, or 3 ounces each white chocolate and semisweet chocolate chips

Method

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position; heat oven to 350 degrees. Spread nuts on large rimmed baking sheet and bake until deep golden brown, 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer nuts to cutting board to cool; chop coarsely and set aside.
2. While nuts toast, cut 18-inch length foil and fold lengthwise to 8-inch width. Fit foil into length of 13 by 9-inch baking pan, pushing it into corners and up sides of pan; allow excess to overhang pan edges. Cut 14-inch length foil and fit into width of baking pan in same manner, perpendicular to first sheet (if using extra-wide foil, fold second sheet lengthwise to 12-inch width). Spray foil-lined pan with nonstick cooking spray.
3. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together in medium bowl; set aside.
4. Whisk melted butter and brown sugar together in medium bowl until combined. Add eggs and vanilla and mix well. Using rubber spatula, fold dry ingredients into egg mixture until just combined; do not overmix. Fold in chocolate and nuts and turn batter into prepared pan, smoothing top with rubber spatula.
5. Bake until top is shiny, cracked, and light golden brown, 22 to 25 minutes; do not overbake. Cool on wire rack to room temperature. Remove bars from pan by lifting foil overhang and transfer to cutting board. Cut into 2-inch squares and serve.

Our Experience

We always start with our ingredients and this was just like every other week for us. Sugar substitutes and whole wheat flour are pretty much staples in our kitchen so, sometimes, we forget we aren’t using the specified ingredients and make rookie mistakes (spoiler alert). Today was one of those days.

The recipe in our cook book did not have the step for toasting the nuts so we didn’t do that. I highly suggest toasting them before you add them into your baking. I usually always toast them but just didn’t think about it until it was too late for these bars. Sometimes I toast nuts and put them in the freezer so I don’t have to think about it for my recipes.

These go together like any standard cookie or bar recipe. Cream the butter and sugar, add the rest of the wet ingredients, mix the dry ingredients, then add them to the wet. Pretty standard. We started by measuring and combining our dry ingredients so they’d be ready when we needed them.

We creamed the butter and “sugar” together. Normally, I would do this by hand but Aubrey wanted to try the mixer.

The sugar substitute really doesn’t act much different from the real thing. Some of the old ones weren’t measured 1:1 like sugar (some still aren’t) so it required a little math and, if the recipe needed the bulk from the sugar, the recipe would still fail. That hasn’t happened in our baking for awhile.

The next step was to add all of the other wet ingredients. Again, it’s probably overkill to use a mixer for these, but that was something I wanted Aubrey to see for herself.

We started adding the dry mixture slowly. The mixture seemed to get pretty thick in a hurry.

Once we had all of the dry ingredients added, I realized that since we chose to use whole wheat flour, we should have added some more liquid. Neither of us thought it should be this thick. Maybe a couple more tablespoons of butter or maybe some unsweetened applesauce. It was too late to add it now!!

The recipe states not to over mix it but with a batter as thick as ours was, that was not easy and I don’t think we achieved it.

It wasn’t easy getting our batter into the pan. We had to press it in like we would a cookie bar dough.

When it was supposed to be done baking, it was still pretty jiggly in the middle. Have I mentioned how unreliable our oven is?? It’s a miracle that we get any baking done with it!! So, while the recipe said to not overbake it, we didn’t want it raw in the middle either. In the end, we probably over baked it.

What we liked.

As is usual, we usually like the flavor of what we have made…this is no exception. They had very good flavor. The bars received a timid 5 out of 5. They were “moist enough” and “OK” but nobody raved about them. The whole wheat gave them a crumbly texture, more like shortbread than a brownie. I didn’t hate it but it wasn’t a favorite of the majority of our taste testers.

As far as a recipe goes, any bar is good in my book because they are so easy to put together. I liked all of the nuts even if they weren’t toasted. Nobody in my house likes nuts in any baked goods so the only reason this one got them is because we were trying to create an authentic blondie. It was nice for a change. I wonder if I can get them in a banana bread now??

What we would change.

The whole wheat flour just didn’t work in this recipe, at least without some added moisture. We could probably mix all purpose and whole wheat in a 1:1 ratio and have better results. As for the Swerve, that too, was not a win with this recipe. As I have stated in previous posts, some sugar substitutes have weird after tastes or “effects” in your mouth when you eat them. Swerve creates a cooling effect in your mouth that is very off putting. It’s just weird and not pleasant to eat! I completely overlooked the fact that we had selected only one sweetener for this recipe. We almost always mix our sweeteners so those weird properties are offset by other sweeteners and it works fairly well most of the time. I’m going to look for another version of brown sugar for the future because 100% Swerve just wasn’t the best!!

Maybe it was on purpose, maybe divine intervention, but the pan of blondies got left out overnight without the lid on them and they dried out to the point of being inedible. I still wanted to take something for our visit with family so I quickly whipped up a second pan of them using AP flour and real sugar. The batter for these was much more like that of a brownie. I used the recipe in my Mom’s Best Desserts this time. (Aubrey swears by her Cook’s book and I swear by my Mom’s book.)

This one was moist and gooey like a brownie without the chocolate!! It was delicious and can I say, the edge pieces are heaven! EVERY person who sampled them when they made it to our final destination gave them a resounding thumbs up as well! We will try them again with a few modifications and see if we can, in fact, make a healthier blondie that tastes just as good as the second pan of them.

What we learned.

I think the biggest takeaway from this bake was remembering that even the simplest of recipes requires some forethought if you are planning to make any substitutions. We should have looked at some whole wheat versions online to see if they had any suggestions for substitution quantities or for adding moisture. Of course, we also learned…again…that using a single sugar substitute is a bad idea if you want your baked goods to taste like they are made with sugar.

Until next week, Happy Baking!