Browned Butter S’mores Blondies

Winter, come on. You’ve overstayed your welcome, and now it’s time for you to go. I could not be more ready for summer than I am right now. I’m about 10 seconds away from going batshit and running up and down the streets of Southie throwing parking cones all over the place. Can someone just wife me up already so I can move to the burbs with a heated garage and I won’t have anxiety over the thought of moving my car even days after a snowstorm? One more hyped up Boston.com headline about the next apocolyptic polar vortex snowstorm of death and I am packing my bags and flying South for the rest of the winter.

But if there is a silver lining to being trapped inside because of snow, it’s cookie baking motivation. Last Wednesday we got another snowstorm in Boston, which meant working from the kitchen table across from Colleen for the day. Since I knew my coworkers would need some motivation to get to the office Thursday, I did some experimenting Wednesday night. Colleen, like most normal humans, loves all things S’mores. I love all things browned butter. So ba da bing, lightbulb above my head, browned butter s’mores blondies. I just used my 8×8 browned butter blondie recipe and added in some graham cracker crumbs, chocolate chunks and dehydrated marshmallows, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • ½ cup butter
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1¼ cups all-purpose Flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup graham cracker crumbs
  • 1  1/4 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips or chunks
  • 1 1/4 cups marshmallow bits

 

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Brown the butter in a medium-size saucepan. Take the stick of butter and cut it into chunks. Melt over medium-heat constantly whisking. First it will start to bubble. Keep whisking. Keep whisking until you see it change to this amber color and then turn off the heat, and use a spatula to transfer to a bowl, making sure to get all of the brown bits.

Step 2: Add the brown sugar and mix with the browned butter. Then transfer to the mixer.

Step 3: Add in egg and vanilla bean extract and mix well.

Step 4: In a separate bowl sift together flour, baking powder, graham cracker crumbs, and salt. Then add to the wet mixture and mix until incorporated.

Step 5: Add in the chocolate chunks and mini marshmallow bits and beat lightly until well incorporated. You could try this with regular mini marshmallows if you weren’t able to find these little bits, I’ve just had mixed luck with baking with those in the past.

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Step 6: Either line the 8×8 glass baking dish with parchment, or grease it up well with non-stick spray. Evenly spread the batter in the baking dish and bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes, just until the top is lightly browned.

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Oh yes. You will want to make these even just to  get your house smelling oh so delicious. Now again, the hardest part about these? Waiting to let them cool. We could not wait, so the pictures below are not the best, but we just had to dig in after being cooped up in the house all day.

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We texted Francesca to come down to be one of our taste testers for this batch, and when she tried to get in the lock was broken in the door that separates our condo units. So then 3 of us not-so-handy girls tried to take apart the door lock, while facetiming with my very-handy Mom. And a locksmith ended up coming the next day, because our skills are better at baking and eating cookies, than they are at fixing broken locks apparently.

So my coworkers got double-cookies last week, which unfortunately means no cookies for them this week because I am traveling to Rhode Island through Wednesday afternoon. Thursday they are already hyping up the weather headlines which helps my already cray cray anxiety. Come on weatherman, why can’t you just say “Hey guys, predicting the weather is actually an impossible job so I’m going to work on just getting everyone to namaste a little bit so we don’t panic like the world is ending every time we think a flurry might be headed our way.” I get it, in the South, a flurry means panic and close the highways, because they don’t have plows and sand and all that. But man, get it together Boston.

But as long as there is no snow Friday then we are a-okay. because you know how I am spending my Valentines day? I am heading to Las Vegas with Colleen and Caitlan to spend my Valentines night with the one and only Britney Spears. An idea we had late night after a few bottles of wine at Lucky’s a month and a half ago is actually happening this weekend. And you know who else is going to be there? Skip and Linda. Aka. Mom and Dad. Luckily, my mom takes tons of pictures, so at least if Saturday morning we wake up with a tiger and our hotel room, a Mike Tyson face tattoo for Skip, and Colleen missing, I’m sure we can use all of mom’s pictures to put together the pieces and figure out what happened the night before.

Weather forecast for Vegas: 78 degrees all weekend, 0% chance or rain, -100% chance of snow. Viva Las Vegas.