Salted Caramel + Brown Butter Blondies

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 lived 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.

{ Brown Butter Blondies Update } I’ve made these quite a few times since I posted this recipe 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 30-40 minutes. I’ve included all the adjustments in the recipe below.

Really make sure you let these brown butter blondies 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

Salted Caramel + Brown Butter Blondies

Serves 9 or 1…depending on your mood

INGREDIENTS

• 2 sticks of unsalted butter (16 tablespoons)
• 1 tablespoon fresh-brewed espresso or coffee (you could cut this back if you don’t like a coffee flavor in your sweets…I love it when chocolate is involved)
• 2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar (can also use dark muscovado sugar)
• ¼ cup granulated sugar
• 3 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 large eggs
• 1 ½ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
• ½ cup caramel sauce (I like Fran’s)
• 1 1/2 teaspoon coarse sea salt to sprinkle on top

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter or spray a 8-inch square baking pan (you can also use a 8-inch springform) 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 mix together.
4. Whisk together the flour, salt and baking powder in a small bowl.
5. In another bowl, whisk together the sugar, vanilla and eggs.
6. Then whisk the brown butter mixture into the sugar-egg 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Bake for about 40 minutes, but check at 30. 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.
10. 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. If I was making this for my kid’s class, I would definitely double the recipe*.
11. It should be mandatory that this is served with vanilla ice cream. But I didn’t have any. Sigh.

*I just doubled the recipe and it took about 25 more minutes to cook…I might recommend if you double the recipe to use two 8-inch square pans…I don’t like how it turned out in a 9 1/2 X 11.