Blondies: brownies without cocoa, but with browned butter
A blondie is a brownie with the cocoa taken out — which is exactly why everything else has to be stronger. The flavour is built on butter browned in the pan, which takes on a nutty, caramel aroma, and on dark brown sugar for molasses depth. The texture follows the same rule as brownies: the tray comes out underbaked, because it keeps cooking in the tin, and overbaked it becomes an ordinary sponge.
Your own work in that: 30 min.
- Butter and batter 30 min
- Baking 25 min
- Cooling 35 min
Step by step
0 / 6 doneBrown the butter
Melt the butter in a light-coloured pan and cook 5–7 minutes over medium heat, stirring. It foams first, the foam subsides, and then brown specks appear on the base along with a smell of nuts. Take it off at once and pour it into a bowl — in a hot pan it burns within a minute.
Ingredients: 200 g butter · 250 g dark brown sugar · 2 pcs eggs · 2 tbsp vanilla sugar · 240 g plain flour · 1 tsp baking powder · ½ tsp salt
TipUse a light stainless pan, not a dark one. In a dark pan you cannot see the colour, and the moment between nutty and burnt passes unnoticed.
Brown specks on the base and a smell of nutsStir in the sugar and cool
Add all the dark sugar to the hot butter and whisk 2 minutes. Leave 10 minutes until lukewarm, and meanwhile heat the oven to 175 °C. Hot, the mixture would scramble the eggs — and the eggs are what give a blondie its characteristic shiny, crackled top.
Sugar into hot butter, then ten minutesBeat in the eggs for two minutes
Add the eggs and vanilla sugar and whisk hard for 2 minutes, until smooth and glossy. It is the only point in this recipe where real effort is required — that whisking is what produces the shiny crust on top.
Fold in the flour without beating
Add the flour, baking powder and salt and fold with a spatula, only until combined. Add the chocolate and nuts and give it a few more strokes. From here on, the less you mix, the chewier the result.
Ingredients: 150 g white chocolate · 100 g pecans · ½ tsp flaky salt
A spatula, only until combinedSpread in the tin and salt it
Line a 23 × 23 cm tin with paper. The batter is as thick as cookie dough — spread it with a spatula dipped in water. Scatter flaky salt over the top: the sweet-salt contrast matters as much in a blondie as the chocolate does.
Ingredients: 150 g white chocolate · 100 g pecans · ½ tsp flaky salt
A wet spatula, then flaky saltBake 25 minutes and pull it early
Bake 25 minutes at 175 °C. The edges should be set and slightly cracked, the middle still soft and faintly wobbling. A skewer in the centre comes out with wet batter — which is the point. Cool in the tin at least 30 minutes before cutting.
TipA blondie keeps cooking in the hot tin for another quarter of an hour. Taken out when the skewer is clean, it sets into dry cake, and nothing reverses that.
Edges set, the middle still wobbling
Before you start
Why dark sugar
Dark brown sugar contains molasses, which supplies moisture, chew and caramel depth. With plain white sugar the blondie comes out drier and without the caramel depth — the one ingredient here not worth substituting.
Other add-ins
Milk chocolate, macadamias, dried cranberries, toffee pieces, or peanut butter dropped in by the teaspoon before baking. 250 g of add-ins in total at most for this tin.
Cutting
Cut them completely cold, ideally after a night in the fridge, with a long knife dipped in hot water. A warm blondie falls apart at the first cut, however good it tastes.
How long they keep
Four days in a sealed container; on the second day they are even chewier. They also freeze cut into squares — thawing on the counter in 30 minutes.
