Sometimes the best creations come to be by happy accident. I had never heard of or tasted a blondie before. I wasn’t supposed to be having blondies that night, either. I was supposed to be making eggnog bread. That’s pretty far from a blondie. To this day, I have still never had eggnog bread.
It was around Christmastime, and we had the traditional quarter gallon carton of eggnog still in the fridge from a few weeks ago. In my family, it was tradition for us to think we needed and liked eggnog, buy a carton, open it, pour out a glass or two, realize nobody actually really likes eggnog, and abandon the carton to the fate of the condiment-decorated refrigerator door. It happens every year. Usually, it just got flushed down the drain at some point, but this year I wanted to be resourceful and repurpose the strange and festive beverage.
I did some research and settled on a simple eggnog loaf cake or bread. We had everything else the recipe called for, so I got started mixing together all the dry ingredients. When it came time to add in the eggnog and I went to measure it out, it poured out a bit thicker than I remember from its carton. Thicker and clumpier. Needless to say, this carton of nog ended up going down the drain like all its fore-cartons.
Adamant to produce some sort of baked good that night, a bit of reverse engineering led me to a recipe for the intriguing “blondie.” Simple ingredients and not as finicky as a brownie, sounded good. And it was. So good that this recipe had been tried and tested and is on standby as a new Christmas (and many other times throughout the year) tradition. It’s like a chocolate chip cookie, but has more of those crispy, crunchy edges and the classic chewy centers. Baking up a tray of these is always a welcome surprise for those of you who have yet to be turned onto the golden (and I daresay more delicious) cousin of the brownie.
This blondie recipe has been the base for many a variation, including with pecans or walnuts, white chocolate chips, peanut butter chips–pretty much anything goes. Even in its most basic form, it is perfection and my very favorite mistake.
