Caramel Chocolate Chunk Blondies

This is the point in summer where I’m realizing I’ve committed to too may engagements, bought too many tickets for concerts and drag shows and trips. And I am quickly running out of time and money — and NYC pride isn’t for another week!

Hey, one of those trips is a trip to IRELAND! It’ll be my first time out of the country in 5 years. I’m going with two Irish friends, so they’re doing a lot of the planning but I have charged myself with finding recommendations for Galway and Dublin! So if you have any, put them in the comments, email me or DM me on Instagram, thanks!

EGO Recommends

App📱: Beli
I think most apps are bad ideas, user-unfriendly, or a waste of time. HOWEVER! I have long bemoaned the restaurant-saving functions of Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Yelp! as they aren’t very intuitive, don’t really help you find new places you’ll like, and are front-loaded with restaurants that pay to be shown first regardless of their quality. Beli is a more collaborative, social app where you can review the restaurants you’ve been to, rank them in a long list (it’s kind of like a game!) save in a separate list the places you want to visit, follow your friends to see what they’re trying, and actually get good recommendations based on what other people are liking. Plus there’s a way to import your previously saved restaurants from other platforms! If you want to follow me, I’m @ericdavidking — although now I’m thinking maybe it should have been @

easygayoven

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This Week’s Recipe

This is not the first time I have tried to inject bar cookies with pools of caramel, but in the past it hasn’t gone so well. It’s a tricky balance to get right: a dough that isn’t so slack the caramel just melts away, and a caramel that isn’t so buttery or soft that it also doesn’t just…. melt away. I tried making caramel-swirled brownies maybe 3 years ago and it was a spectacular failure, so making these work was a major redemption arc for me.

Here’s what made the difference in the many tests I did on these caramel-studded blondies.

1. Cooking the caramel to a high enough temperature
   To make chewy caramels that hold their shape, we cook the sugar twice: once with a little bit of water and corn syrup until a deep amber color, then again after the butter, cream, vanilla and salt are added. Letting the temperature reach 250°F on an instant-read thermometer (not touching the bottom of the pan!) ensured that the caramel would release enough water to not just evaporating into the dough when baked.

   

2. Studding, not mixing in, the caramel
   Mixing caramel chunks into the dough resulted in big hunks of caramel stuck to the bottom of the parchment, and cavernous pockets in the dough where the steam the caramels released couldn’t escape. Instead, I mix about 3/4 of the chopped chocolate into the dough, spread it out in the pan, then evenly dot the surface with bigger chocolate chunks and squares of caramel.

   

3. Thick caramel squares
   I figured out that the caramels evaporated less and remained chewy little pools when they were pressed into the dough as thicker pieces. So I actually folded the caramel in half (mine were set in a eighth-sheet tray) and cut that resulting slab into 3/4-1-inch squares, essentially stacking two squares on top of each other, so the caramel would go deeper. Then I pressed the pieces into the dough and sort of pushed the dough back onto the edges of the caramel, which I think helped them maintain their shape.

Can I just make this with store-bought caramels?
I haven’t tried but I don’t see why not. If you try it, please report back!

If you’ve loved my Best-Ever Chocolate Chip Cookies, you’re going to love these. Although, don’t be fooled, the base recipes are not the same, since these needed to be soft and chewy (corn starch and an extra egg yolk), but didn’t need to spread since they’re baked in a tin, meaning we only needed about half the leavener. There’s also less sugar since, with the caramel, they are sweet enough. I am usually so ready to give away test batches to friends (because I get tired of the same thing!) but when these were finalized, I was sad to see them leave in their little to-go boxes.

Caramel Chocolate Chunk Blondies

Makes 16 blondies, or more depending on how you slice it.