White chocolate and pecan blondies

Ugh. I like what I do, really I do, but you know those days where everything just goes wrong? And it just gets worse and worse and spreads into your everyday life until you cannot walk down the street without falling off the kerb? Yep, that was my day yesterday. Never mind this set of lovelies was going to combine into baking magic and hopefully cheer me right up.

Why are my eggs in a jug? I dropped the egg box, three eggs had to be salvaged immediately, Told you it was one of those days.

I have never made blondies before and looking at recipes they seem to be split into two camps. Those that use melted white chocolate and those that use just brown sugar to flavour them. I do not know which camp is 'right', if any, but I went with the chocolate camp.

I did tweak the recipe though, I lowered the sugar a little as I thought that they would be very sweet already. I also stole ideas from the brown sugar camp and used some light brown sugar instead of all caster sugar.

White chocolate and pecan blondies (adapted from hummingbird bakery)


150g white chocolate
125g butter
100g caster sugar
30g light brown sugar
2 eggs
200g plain flour
100g shelled pecan nuts, chopped


Preheat the oven to 170C/150 FAN and grease and line a brownie tin.


Place a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Place the butter and chocolate into the bowl and leave to melt.


Stir the sugars into the melted mixture until well combined. The mixture will look curdled and split at this point, do not panic, all will be well. Add the eggs and beat quickly, the mixture should come back together. 


Add the flour and chopped nuts and stir until all the flour is incorporated and the the nuts are evenly dispersed. 


Pour into prepared brownie tin and level. Bake in preheated oven for 30-35 minutes.


Leave to cool in the tin before removing and cutting into squares. 

A few notes. I used a tin with pretty much the same overall measurements as the recipe and found the blondies to be quite shallow. First of all this affected the coking time in my oven, I took them out after 22 minutes. Make sure you keep an eye on them. They are rich so shallow is not necessarily a problem but I do like that fudgy centre bit you get in deep brownies. I may up the recipe by half when I make them again. Clearly the number of blondies you get depends on how large you cut them! 

I think these are amazing. It took a lot of self restraint not to sit and eat the entire tin. M likes them but is not overly keen on pecans so I need to think of some variations. I was wondering about salted peanuts to combat the sweetness? We shall see.