Recipe | White chocolate blondies

A white chocolate alternative to traditional chocolate brownies. Gooey and rich: definitely for those with a sweet tooth!

I believe, technically, blondies don’t feature chocolate at all (vanilla is substituted for the chocolate). However, I couldn’t resist going for a white chocolate version.

I got this recipe from the BBC Good Food website. A few warnings from my experience: I had to go past the advised cooking time to get the middle to solidify and the end product was still very dense with a slightly “raw” appearance. The top cracked and it was difficult to cut the blondies cleanly. That said, they taste great. So as long as your priority is flavour, not appearance, I recommend you give this a try!

Ingredients

225 g / 8 oz butter/margarine
200 g / 7 oz white chocolate, chopped into small chunks
3 large eggs
200 g / 7 oz soft light brown sugar
100 g / 3.5 oz caster sugar
175 g / 6 oz plain flour
0.5 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla extract

Method (makes 16 – 20 blondies)

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C/ 160 degrees C fan / 350 degrees F / Gas Mark 4.

Line your brownie pan or baking tray with baking paper. My tin measures 18 x 32 x 2.5 cm.

Melt the butter and 100 g of the white chocolate together in a bowl. You can do this over a pan of hot water or you can cheat, like me, and use the microwave to give the mixture short zaps then stir in between zaps. Leave this mixture to cool for 15 minutes.

Combine the flour and baking powder in another bowl.

Use an electric mixer to beat the eggs together with the sugar until the mixture is thick and foamy. This takes a few minutes. You’ll know you’re there when the mixture dripping from the beaters leaves a trail on the surface which takes 2 seconds to disappear.

Add the vanilla to the melted butter and chocolate and give it a good stir, add all this to the egg mixture. Use a spatula to gently fold all the ingredients together until most of the buttery streaks have been folded in (see pic below to see what I mean by buttery streaks!)

Tip the flour mixture into the bowl and continue to use the spatula to fold in again. Add the 100g remaining chocolate chunks. Pour the mixture into your tin.

As I said earlier, the original instructions say to bake for 3o-35 minutes. However, after 35 minutes, while the top of my white chocolate blondies was dry, the middle was still rather raw. So I turned the oven down to 120 degrees C and left them in for another 10 minutes. Then I turned the oven off and left them in for another 10.

I then took them out of the oven and left them to cool completely in the tin before turning out and cutting into slices. As I said before, the appearance of the middle of the white chocolate blondies is rather “raw”, but as this is how brownies are supposed to turn out, I guess this is right. Besides, they taste great!

I drizzled a bit of melted white and dark chocolate over the blondies for a final bit of decoration. Not the best looking bake I’ve ever made, but a sweet gooey treat nonetheless! 🙂