Blondie Bars

For some reason nobody in the UK knows what these are. For the uninitiated (you poor bastards), blondies are like brownies, but no chocolate in the base dough.

Blondie Bars

This recipe comes from Magnolia Bakery. I have adapted it slightly for quantities of chocolate and nuts, and adjusting flour for plain/self raising. They're easy to make, and very tasty.

Ingredients:

1 cup plain flour

1/2 cup self raising flour

1 tsp baking soda

170g softened butter or cooking margarine

1/2 cup white sugar, caster or granulated

1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp vanilla extract

c.100g white chocolate chips

c.100g milk chocolate chips

c.100g plain chocolate chips*

1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts (optional if you don't like nuts)

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 180c and prepare a 10x10 pan or similar

Beat together butter and sugars until combined

Beat in the eggs and vanilla

Beat in flours and baking soda

These stages of batter making...

Mix in chocolate chips and nuts

Put dough into pan and level off

Bake c.45 minutes until a cake tester comes out nearly clean

Cover the top in foil if it browns before the rest is baked. Mine did not cook enough after 45 minutes, and I had sh*t to do, so I turned off the oven and let it cook the rest of the way in the cooling oven. This worked.

*This was the chocolate assortment I used and it worked rather nicely.