I tell you the truth when I say that these blondies tasted so good. They were fudgy blondies that were packed to the brim with delicious milk chocolate.
Now I don’t take credit for this recipe. I found the recipe for these blondies on the great blog Handle the Heat. I made the recipe according to her instructions at first, but then I adjusted it to my family’s taste. Now I’m sharing the adjustments I’ve made, but be sure to check out Handle the Heat and try the original recipe out too!
When making these blondies you want to get everything ready before you start to bake, it’ll save loads of unneeded stress.
You’ll notice that this recipe for Blondies has bread flour in it. You are probably wondering why. Basically bread flour contains more protein than plain (all-purpose) flour, this extra protein makes the Blondies more chewy. You can, of course, use all plain flour if you can’t get bread flour but the texture will be different. You’ll find bread flour in quite a few different recipes because of the chewiness it adds, for example in some chocolate chip cookie recipes.
The extra egg yolk contributes to a more fudgy blondie, which is great!
The light brown sugar used in this recipe adds a nice caramel flavour, due to the molasses (treacle) that it contains. For a brown sugar substitute see bottom of post.
You can play around a bit with the sugar you use for this recipe, for example you can use 100g light brown sugar and 50g caster sugar or use dark brown sugar instead of light brown. I’ve used a mix of caster, light brown and dark brown sugar. It all depends on your flavour preference. If you use all light brown sugar it will produce a balanced caramel flavour. If you use all dark brown it’ll yield a rather strong, but not unpleasant, butterscotch flavour. A mix of both light and dark brown sugar will have a balance of caramel and butterscotch. I don’t recommend using all white sugar as it’ll be too sweet and be quite bland in flavour.
I’ve found that with these blondies, the chocolate you use should be of good quality. It really impacts on the whole product. You don’t have to get the most expensive bar in shops (big price doesn’t mean good quality), but try to find a bar that doesn’t contain a large amount of sugar as the blondies are quite sweet by themselves. Try to find a bar with a good cocoa amount, too.
When baking these blondies I recommend rotating the tin every so often, to ensure even browning. If you think that it’s browning too quickly, you can take a piece of tin foil (which should be slightly longer than the tin) and cover the top of the tin with it.
So preheat your oven, grease and line your 8 inch (20cm) square tin and gather all your ingredients. Come on! Let’s get baking!
Ingredients
115g butter, melted
150g light brown sugar
1 whole medium egg + 1 medium egg yolk
1 tbsp vanilla extract
65g plain flour
65g strong white bread flour
1 tsp salt
300g milk chocolate, chopped into chunks
Sea salt for topping, optional
Method
Preheat the oven to 160°C. Grease and line an 8in square tin. Make sure to grease all the corners liberally.
In a large bowl, mix together the melted butter and sugar until fully combined. Then add the whole egg, egg yolk and vanilla, mix together.
Next tip in the flours and salt, mix until almost fully combined. You want to see a few pockets of flour. Add in 2/3 of the choc chunks and mix until fully incorporated.
Scrape the blondie batter into the prepared tin and level it. Cover the top of the batter with the remaining chocolate chunks. Sprinkle with a generous pinch of sea salt.
Bake for 25 minutes, or until golden. Once baked, let it cool in tin for 10 minutes and then remove from tin and let it cool completely on a cooling rack.
If you can’t find brown sugar, here’s how you can make your own.
For light brown: take 200g (1 cup) caster sugar and tip it into a food processor. Add 1 tbsp (15ml) treacle to the sugar. Pulse the mix together until they are evenly combined, but don’t go crazy with the pulsing as you don’t want to turn it into icing sugar.
For dark brown sugar: follow the same steps as you would light brown sugar but add 2 tbsp (30ml) treacle instead.
