Browned Butter Bourbon Blondies

Food bloggers are adding the full slate of ingredients into their recipe titles these days so I’m joining the herd. Only in this case I forgot to include the chocolate chips!  I should have called them “Browned Butter, Bourbon, and Chocolate Chip Blondies” but that seemed a bit like piling it on unnecessarily. There is only so much real estate on these photos kids. And besides, I wasn’t feeling so good about adding in those chips. Where are we supposed to draw the line with this add-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink trend anyway?

This recipe started their life as ordinary blondies but were made extraordinary with the addition of the ever-popular browned butter tweak and a heavy splash of bourbon. Bourbon?  Yup. Bourbon makes everything taste better — which is why these days you will see a splash of it popping up in just about every good thing blogged this past year. Sis Boom Blog is nothing if not trendy and you don’t need to twist my arm to join the bourbon trend. Recently I saw it in splashed into salad dressing. Mm… ok.

Browned Butter Bourbon Blondies

Try putting an extra splash of bourbon in your bourbon to help your attitude! It has been working for me this week as I deal with garage contractors and insurance companies every day after work.

These blondies would have been sublimely perfect and they were certainly in no need of further additions. I wish I stopped after adding the bourbon. Like every other food blogger I know, however, I couldn’t resist the cheap temptation to add chocolate and get more likes on Instagram.

Or something.

It is what we food bloggers do. We add things. It’s annoying. I get it. But it would be a very boring food blog world out here if we didn’t.  Believe me.  If we didn’t add things we’d all still be blogging about the same buttermilk biscuits or brownies but because we add things you get cheddar, onion and jalapeño bacon biscuits or caramel brownie Nutella marshmallow brownies.

Adding chocolate to this recipe, however, felt somewhat akin to cheating.  Like shooting fish in a barrel. An easy way out. I wish I had either left them plain (with bourbon of course –which is now the new “plain”) or had gotten a bit more in touch with my creative self. I have a cabinet full of coconut (regular, sweetened and toasted), dried cherries, candied orange peel, peanut butter and peanut butter chips, bananas, banana chips, and so on. I could have added any of these but no. I added chocolate chips.

I’m a wuss. I took the easy way out. Don’t take the easy way out.

I have always thought that the whole point of a blondie was that it was to be something of an “anti-brownie”. The butterscotch yang to the brownie’s overplayed chocolate/cocoa ying. By rights, shouldn’t that mean blondies contain no chocolate at all?

Ever.

What was I doing upsetting the natural order of things and letting my creative self down all at the same time?

Shame on me.

But they were good. Great even. Damn.

Clearly I tossed in these chocolate chips on impulse because I knew they would get cheap, quick applause. And it worked. Almost too well. Chocolate chips took them so far over the edge I could not get any work done for a full hour after setting them out on the lunchroom table at the office.

“O.M.G. did you make those weird brownies in the lunch room?”

I laughed but tried to not be so obvious to the fact that I was laughing at her poorly structured thought — which she uttered aloud in her own vocal fry “Internet-speak”. (I hope that doesn’t become a thing as popular as browned butter or bourbon.)

“You so totally need to make these again!”

I will. But next time I’m adding bacon. So there.

But for now:

Browned Butter Bourbon Blondies

Everyone loves Browned Butter Bourbon Blondies!