Mix up a toll-house-cookie-style dough that’s rich with brown sugar and European-style butter. Fold in a hefty handful of chopped pecans and an excessive amount of chocolate chips. Slather the batter thickly in a pan and toss even more pecans and chocolate on top. Bake it until it’s golden and chewy around the edges but still molten and gooey in the center, then cut it into thick, chunky slabs. Blondies.
The nuts add richness and subtle crunch to these pudgy bars, but if you can’t eat nuts or just prefer to leave them out, the blondies would still be great without them.
Whenever I make cookies or bars with mix-ins such as nuts or chocolate, I always reserve some of the mix-ins and sprinkle them on top before baking. The bars are so much prettier and more enticing-looking with the colors and shapes of the goodies on top, instead of just a lumpy brown surface with everything hidden underneath.
These blondies bake in a small pan (8 inches square) so they’re very thick - that’s what gives them that great contrast between the chewy outside and soft inside. But if you cut them into 9 large squares as I did here, you and eight friends had better be really hungry. I cut them in squares at first to make it easier to get them out of the pan, then halve each square into two rectangles to make 18 more reasonably-sized portions. You can, of course, cut them as big or small as you like.
Making these ahead and what to do with leftovers:
- Make these at least a couple of hours ahead, to give them time to cool before slicing.
- They’ll stay fresh for 2 or 3 days, stored tightly covered at cool room temperature.
- Blondies freeze well, especially if uncut. Wrap the entire block - or whatever uncut portion you have left over - in plastic wrap and then again in a freezer-safe zip-lock bag, and keep for two months. If you have cut blondies that you want to freeze, double-wrap them the same way, but plan to enjoy them within a month.
Blondies
Ingredients
- 1½ cups (6 1/3 ounces or 180 grams) all-purpose flour
- ¾ teaspoon baking soda
- ¾ teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt (or 3/8 teaspoon Morton’s)
- 12 tablespoons (6 ounces or 1½ sticks) unsalted butter, preferably European-style, at room temperature, plus additional for the pan
- 2/3 cup brown sugar
- 1/3 cup granulated sugar
- 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 1 large egg
- 1 large egg yolk
- 1 cup coarsely chopped pecans (about 3 ounces), divided
- 12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips, divided
Directions
- Step 1 Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 8-inch square baking pan and set it aside.
- Step 2 In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and salt.
- Step 3 In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, 2 minutes, scraping down the bowl occasionally with a rubber spatula. Beat in the vanilla, then the egg, then the yolk, scraping the bowl between each addition.
- Step 4 Add the flour mixture and beat on low speed just until combined. Use the rubber spatula to fold in ¾ cup of the pecans, and 1½ cups of the chocolate chips.
- Step 5 Spread the dough in the prepared pan. Sprinkle the remaining pecans and chocolate chips evenly over the surface of the dough.
- Step 6 Bake the blondies for 30 minutes. The edges will be browned and risen, and the center should be moist and look slightly underdone but not wet. (Expect the center to sink a bit as the bars cool). Remove the pan to a cooling rack and let the bars cool completely before cutting.
