Blond(i)es Have More Fun

Hello, friends. Once again, I have been thwarted in my blogging by the demands of my actual life — boring! — but, as usual, that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped baking. I have a few recent projects to fill you in on, and we’ll start today with a pair of them from earlier this fall.

After red velvet, the next bakes I bothered with in the book were Blondies, Vol. 1 and 2. These two recipes — plain Blondies and the more complex Brown Butter Blondies — were essentially for what I’d call cookie bars. They looked and tasted like chocolate chip cookies; they were just in a slab instead of in individual rounds.

Now, the Logansporters among you will know that my mother is famous for her cookie bars. Her recipe is the GOAT of chocolate chippy traybakes, and to save you some suspense, I’ll tell you now: These didn’t unseat it. But you can never go too wrong with a big ol’ tray of chocolate chip baked goods, so let’s get into how these fine competitors for the crown went.

The only time when Blondies 1.0 were moist: when they were dough

In the first iteration of these blond bois, the flavor was good, but the texture went slightly awry. I’m almost certain this is my fault. I think somewhere along the line I must have left out a leavening agent, or an egg, or something, because bizarrely, these tasted stale from the minute they were made. They were edible, just not soft enough — and I’m confident that, if I tried them again while paying slightly more attention, I’d fix whatever error I managed to invent in round one.

The second batch, though, was a winner. I’ve discussed before that brown butter is a scam, and I stand by that. There was no nutty richness or depth of flavor to these blondies that regular butter couldn’t have achieved; they were just a run-of-the-mill non-disaster. Instead of the butter, I think the true key to these was the eggs. They used six, making them essentially a giant chocolate chip cake. If the original blondies were too tough, these were, if anything, almost too fluffy — at least to qualify as a brownie of some kind. They really were like eating one square of unfrosted cake at a time, and that is an experience I’d recommend.

Blondies 2.0: So good I ate them all before I could get a decent photo

These projects were the last chocolate chip ones for a while in this book, so, looking back upon their creation now, I have a nostalgic fondness for their straightforwardness. The other bakes I have to tell you about were less straightforward, and in one memorable instance in particular, a heck of a lot more straight-up chaotic in their effect on my previously tidy kitchen. We’ve got two more bakes from the brownie chapter to recap, and then — just in time for winter — it’s on to fruit bakes. If you like cinnamon, citrus, or tales of molten candy coating the walls of a one-bedroom apartment, then trust me folks: You’ll want to stick around for my next few posts.