Chocolate Chip Paisley Blondies

To those who have been perusing my blog of late, it may seem that I never do any baking! Au contraire. I was in the process of moving, but finally got settled enough that yesterday I got to break in my new oven. And do you know what the best thing about my new oven is? It's not 20 years old! It's got a digital thermometer and timer built in! OMG! WHAT! Yes, a new age has dawned.

So what did I make for my first recipe? I didn't feel like going to the store (um, do I ever?), so I looked through my meager collection of cookbooks - I have like, two - and came upon a recipe in “Home Cooking The Costco Way” for Chocolate Chip Paisley Blondies. Essentially these are just chocolate chip cookies made into bars with a little extra dose of chocolate sauce thrown into the mix. As you'll see from the recipe, that chocolate sauce and an extra egg, plus using baking powder instead of soda, are really the only main differences between your general chocolate chip recipe.

Chocolate Chip Paisley Blondies

3/4 cup ( 1 1/2 sticks) butter or margarine, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups (12 oz) semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional)
1/2 cup chocolate syrup

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a 13x9 inch baking pan.

Beat butter and sugars until well blended. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in vanilla.

Stir together flour, baking powder and salt; beat into the butter mixture. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.

Spread half the batter (about 2 1/2 cups) in the prepared pan. Spoon syrup over the top; evenly spread over the surface to within 1/2 inch of the edges. Drop teaspoonfuls of the remaining batter over the syrup so the surface is almost completely covered. (As the blondies bake, the syrup showing in the spaces between the batter form a paisley effect.)

Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until lightly browned. Cool completely in the pan on a wire rack. Cut into bars. Makes about 36 bars.

The butter and sugars.

After the eggs and vanilla.

And the flour.

The chocolate chips. I didn't do nuts.

After drizzling on the chocolate sauce. And as the directions say, it's very important to leave space around the edges! Otherwise the chocolate cooks into the side of the pan, making it impossible to get the babies out of there.

Dollops of more dough go on top.

Out of the oven. Look at those fun chocolate swirls!

Yum!

The extra egg in the mix makes these cookie bar blondies much lighter than if you just did them regularly. I suppose the baking powder may also have a hand in that, but as I can never tell the difference between powder and soda, that's beyond my reckoning. You can see that I only have my square pan when the recipe calls for a 9x13 one. I used half of it in here and tried the other half in a cupcake tin. Which I DO NOT recommend if you don't have cupcake liners to use. And even then, I imagine they would get very stuck to the liners and be hard to eat. I ended up having to trash all of them because they literally would not come out of the cupcake tin. So - from the pan, good! From a cupcake tin, bad!