Brown-butter toffee blondies
The addition of smashed up slabs of toffee and chopped walnuts add a crunchy but oh- so-chewy texture when you bite in to each piece.
These blondie bites are one of my wife’s favourite desserts that I make about once every six months for her. I’ve also distributed these bites amongst colleagues when I have been working on-site with a client.
When you serve these toffee blondies you can either cut them larger (100mm/4″ squares) in size as an individual serving or bite-sized about 40mm square. Either way, the obligatory glass of cold milk should be included.
I find the blondies more than sweet enough as-is, but if you have a very sweet tooth, or you just like the look of the dust treats, a light dusting of confectioner’s sugar adds a nice touch.
- 1/2 tbsp butter, softened for baking pan
- 1/2 tbsp butter, softened for parchment paper
- 1 tbsp all-purpose flour for parchment paper
- 285 g unsalted butter
- 400 g light brown sugar
- 100 g granulated sugar
- 3 eggs, large
- 280 g all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 2 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 120 g walnuts chopped
- 175 g toffee smashed in to small pieces
- 1 tbsp confectioner's sugar for dusting, optional
- Pre-heat oven to 176C/350F
- Butter a 22cm-by-33cm (9"-by-13") baking pan.
- Line the bottom of the buttered baking pan with parchment paper
- Butter the face-up side of the parchment paper
- Sprinkle one tablespoon of flour over the buttered parchment paper to prevent sticking and aid with browning
- Put a saucepan (wide, shallow preferred) over a medium heat on the stove
- Cook the butter in the saucepan until it turns golden brown. You know it is cooked as it will smell nutty.
- Remove the saucepan from heat
- Let the butter cool in the saucepan
- Chop the walnuts into small pieces with a kitchen knife
- Smash the toffee into small pieces with a rolling pin
- Place the brown sugar in to the bowl of an electric mixer
- Place the granulated sugar on top of the brown sugar that's in the bowl of the electric mixer
- Pour the filtered and now cooled brown butter over the two sugars
- Use the paddle attachment with the mixer on the lowest speed setting, combine the browned butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar
- Add the eggs to the butter/sugar mixture
- Use the mixer on slowest speed setting to just combine the eggs and sugars and butter
- Increase the speed of the mixer to medium/medium-high
- Mix until the butter/egg/sugar mixture becomes a light colour and is fluffy. This is usually about three minutes.
- Sift together the flour, the salt and the baking powder in a separate bowl. You can do this while the mixer is working on the eggs and sugar mixture.
- Add the vanilla to the butter/egg/sugar mixture
- Reduce the speed of the mixer to low
- Add the flour/salt/baking powder mixture to the butter/sugar/egg/vanilla mixture
- Add the chopped walnuts to the combined batter mixture
- Add the smashed toffee bits to the combined batter mixture
- Slowly mix everything until thoroughly combined, usually about a minute or two
- Pour batter mixture in to prepared baking pan
- Spread batter mixture in pan as uniformly as possible
- Bake for 28 to 40 minutes on middle/lower-middle rack.
- Bake until a cake tester comes out clean. Very importantly, avoid over-baking!
- Transfer baking pan to a wire rack to cool
- Once cake is thoroughly cooled, turn the cake out on to a cutting board
- Cut in to individual servings or small bite-sized pieces
- As an optional step, very lightly dust blondies with confectioner's sugar.
You can to watch the final few minutes of your cooking time like a hawk to make sure these don't overcook. It's really easy to go from "blondie" to "brownie" if you are not careful.
The problem with a little overcooking is that the bottom of the blondie gets a little extra crunchy. You can fix this by cutting the blondie cake in to bite-sized pieces and then taking a very sharp kitchen knife just trimming off 1mm of the underside of each piece to reveal the chewy inner layer.
When you are browning your butter I find a large, shallow saucepan to be a lot easier to handle than a tall, regular saucepan. The butter browns a lot quicker too.
If you have browned your butter a little too much and wound up with burnt milk solids on the bottom of the pan, you can filter out the burnt solids very easily. Using a very fine mesh strainer, such as one you would use for tea leaves, or a coffee filter, pour your browned butter through the fine mesh filter three separate times, or through the coffee filter once. Problem solved.
If your batter mixture is a little too sticky to spread easily and your parchment paper keeps sliding around, use two spatulas or wooden spoons held in each hand and move them in a "pulling apart" motion to spread the batter mixture around.