Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen: Blondies

Revelations are always to be had for the experimental baker.  That is one of the great things we come to find out as we move through the recipes in Dorie Greenspan's masterpiece Dorie's Cookies.  There are always add-ins and take-outs suggested by the Beurre & Sel cookie company baker and owner who, in the case of the Blondie, shows us we can use the muffin tin to create a new style of cookie.  After trying the results, the experimental baker is left to wonder if virtually any recipe might not increase its allure by the muffin tin?  As Dories says, the ingredients here are fairly standard fare: your sugars, your egg, your vanilla, your bit of chocolate, your butter, but the add-ins of coconut and

pecans add the co-texture with the chocolate chunks; but most importantly, it the scoop of dough that is dropped in the cup of the muffin tin, then just barely pushed down to dimple, that allows for an eventual crunchy exterior and a marvelously gooey center.  Her own Blondies had called for small muffin tin, but I had only what I would call a medium sized muffin tin, which made for a larger scoop and maybe 2-3 more minutes in the oven.  I watched for the browning of the edges, yet all the while the middle could be seen as moist and melting.  Because my batch was bigger than recommended there was no way to know how these would hold up. I let them cool long enough to contract from the tin enough to pull them out of their case.  A knife through the center revealed a brown edge but near dough-like texture in the middle -- the kind of the texture that usually means a batch won't last long on the plate.  With a little more experimentation, one could see the rest of the recipes fitting nicely inside the tin of choice, depending on just how gooey you like it.