Make Ahead

{ salted caramel + brown butter blondies }

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January  2, 2015
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{ salted caramel + brown butter blondies }
  • Prep time 25 minutes
  • Cook time 45 minutes
  • Serves 9 or 1, depending on your mood
Author Notes

I woke up this morning pretty excited to lounge around. The most pressing obligation being decorating the Christmas tree. Not a bad day to look forward to. As I lay in bed scrolling through my email, my Food52 email caught my eye…Brown Butter Blondies by DashandBella (Phyllis Grant). This got me out of bed, stat. I hadn’t made blondies since we were living in Beijing and then I was making Martha Stewart’s recipe…from her Cookies cookbook. Love this cookbook, it’s amazing. The below recipe is a marriage between the two referenced above. I added some Tai Tai flair…a little fresh-brewed espresso, some caramel and a healthy throw of coarse sea salt at the end. It is a SWEET BOMB. If you don’t like super sweet stuff, just keep on moving. This is the perfect my-hormones-are-raging-and-nothing-will-satisfy-my-salt-sweet-chocolate-caramel-craving. But these will.

I might be a little obsessed with salted caramel right now.

{ Blondie Update } I’ve made these quite a few times since I posted this recipe (on my blog) and I’ve decided to amend it. I adjusted the flour and the brown sugar adding a touch more flour and a touch less brown sugar. I also increased the bake time to 45 minutes. I’ve included all the adjustments in the recipe below.

Really make sure you let them cool in the pan. They’ll finish their cooking in there and they actually taste better when cooled. One final note…I decided I like sprinkling with the coarse salt as soon as the Blondies get out of the oven rather than before. Otherwise it melts into the caramel while they’re cooking and I like to see the little crystals sparkling on top. The last time I made these I used Recchiuti Burnt Caramel Sauce on the top…sublime. Look it up. Buy some. Eat it. Now. Without haste.

These are so dang tasty, I really want everyone to have the same Blondie experience that I did. Let me know how they work for you! Rebecca @ DH xo —Rebecca @ DisplacedHousewife.com

What You'll Need
Ingredients
  • 2 sticks unsalted butter (16 tablespoons)
  • 1 tablespoon fresh-brewed expresso or coffee
  • 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 3 teaspoons vanilla
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 1/2 cup caramel sauce (I love Fran's & Recchiuti)
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons coarse sea salt for sprinkling on top when they are done
Directions
  1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter or spray a 8-inch square baking pan with nonstick.
  2. Put the two sticks of butter in a sauce pan and melt. Once melted, crank up the heat to medium high. Stand by, stirring and watching. This isn’t the time to go and put your dry ingredients together. When you start to see it leaving the golden butter color and turning brown…it’s very close to being done. You’ll start to see this color change happen around the edges. Once it moves to the rest of the pan, take it off the heat and pour in a bowl to cool a bit.
  3. Add the espresso to the browned butter and blend together.
  4. Whisk together the sugar, vanilla and eggs. Then whisk in the brown butter mixture. This will take a lot of elbow grease to incorporate. You could use your stand mixer, but I didn’t. My dishwasher broke (don’t even get me started) and the new one doesn’t get here until next week. It just sounded like more dishes. Yuck.
  5. Pour the flour mixture into the brown butter mixture. Use as few strokes as possible to just combine. Add the chocolate chips and mix until mixed through. Make sure there aren’t any pockets of flour…this is thick batter and they could hide in there.
  6. Pour the batter into your prepared pan. Smooth it out so that it’s even. Drizzle the caramel sauce over the top, using your spatula or a spoon to make sure it’s evenly drizzled about. Try to make pretty if you’re feeling it.
  7. Bake for about 45 minutes, but check at 35. It should start to get a bit of a tan and a hair darker around the edges with only a tiny jiggle in the center. Cook until the major jiggle wiggle is gone. However, these will be ooey gooey. Sprinkle with the 1 1/2 teaspoons of coarse salt as soon as they’re out of the oven.
  8. Cool completely in the pan (seriously). Invert onto a cutting board. You can cut them using cookie cutters (like Martha) with the smooth side up. Or, flip the blondies over and cut them into squares. I was thinking that it would be cute to use a springform pan and have them come out like pie slices. Next time.
  9. It should be mandatory that this is served with vanilla ice cream. But I didn’t have any. Sigh.
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