candy bar blondies

It’s been a big month over here and while not all baked goods have made it to the blog yet, there have been many.  A few weeks ago, I may or may not have enlisted my mom to help me make an apple cake at midnight after I also made her read and edit 3,492 cover letters earlier that day.  Stay tuned for the apple cake.  Be thankful I’m not making you read the cover letters.

Now I’m back and giving Oh, honey honey the care, attention, and sugar it deserves.  This post also could have been titled “Kit-Kat, Reeces, and Snickers Blondies” or more truthfully, “Blondies I made so I didn’t get diabetes”.  I bought an unreasonable amount of candy last weekend “for the kids”, didn’t get a single trick or treater, and fell asleep halfway through watching hocus pocus on ABC family with my cousin.  We are both 27 years old.

    Naturally, my first thought was just to eat all the candy I bought.  I made a strong effort but for the sake of my health and sanity, I chopped the rest up and baked it into blondies to bring to work.  These blondies are the EASIEST.  I think I say that about all recipes on this site but right now it’s especially true.  All it takes is one bowl and you even get to melt the butter rather than worrying about creaming softened butter and sugar.  In my opinion, if you can melt the butter in a recipe it saves you at least 2 hours.  I say this because I never take the butter out of the refrigerator in advance and end up staring at it on the countertop for 2 hours until it’s softened appropriately to cream with the sugar.

(Balancing is hard)

You can use whatever candy you have on hand and this is a great blondie base recipe for anything your heart desires.  Cinnamon and salted caramel?  Dark chocolate and walnuts?  Raspberries and white chocolate?  Those all sound like lovely and classy options, which is not at all what I did this time.  These are trashy halloween candy blondies and also a good opportunity to take advantage of the candy on sale right now as they start replacing pumpkin-shaped peanut butter cups with christmas tree-shaped peanut butter cups on the shelves.

Sorry for the medicore quality photos.  The change in daylight savings and lack of natural light is really killing my vibe.

For the record, I brought these to work at 8:30 in the morning and they were gone before I got out of staff meeting at 10:30.  Crowd pleasers.

Candy Bar Blondies

(doubled the recipe from garnish with lemon)

1 1/2 sticks of melted butter, cooled slightly

2 cups of brown sugar (dark or light)

2 eggs

3 teapspoons of vanilla extract

2 cups of flour

1 teaspoon of baking powder

1 teaspoon of salt

2 to 2 1/2 cups of chopped up candy bars (I used a combination of kit-kats, peanut butter snickers, reece’s peanut butter cups, and take-5 bars)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and line a 10 inch pan with parchment paper.

Melt the butter, let it cool slightly, and then mix well with the brown sugar.  Stir in the eggs and vanilla and then combine the flour, baking powder, and salt.  Gently mix in your candy bars of choice (make sure to eat a few along the way, this part is essential).

Pour the batter into the pan and spread it out evenly as the batter will be thick and almost cookie dough like.  Bake for 25-30 minutes and cut into squares when cooled.  These puppies were rich so I think I ended up making each one smaller than in the above photos…and then eating two.

Enjoy!