Tuesdays with Dorie: Peanuttiest Blondies

I just realized that it's been over a month since I posted anything but cooking club posts. This ends soon. Now that I'm back from the Halloween whirlwing tour-guiding, it's time to tell you about many delicious things I've been cooking, and some ideas and dreams and pursuits I've been pursuing.

For now, though, there's Dorie Greenspan's Peanuttiest Blondies. I didn't have chocolate chips, so my blondies were blonde indeed, and I think they could have used something to offset the richness of the peanut butter and peanuts.

Halloween really was nuts, with 11 tours in two weekends, including one that was three and a half hours long, guest appearances from my aunt Nicki and uncle Joe, from Marie and Jim of Heavenly Cake Place, and from Matt, who checked out the tour for the first time and lent his keen directorial eye and New York loving sensibility to making it even better. My tour was ambushed by zombies not once but twice, the second time in the middle of the afternoon, when the foul fiends crept up behind me and were this close to chewing on my neck. I was heckled, applauded, and exhausted. Peter Stuyvesant, Edgar Allen Poe, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire victims all got their due, McSorley's Old Ale House provided drinks, and I was far too busy walking at night to get half the halloween candy that I wanted. I did, however, get steaming tamales from the Day of the Dead celebration going on at the St. Marks Church, and in the end, I think that's a win.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Crack Blondies

Dorie called these something like Chewy, Chunky Blondies, but that is a serious understatement. These candy bar-like lumps of all-American overkill are unquestionably crack blondies. And to think that until last night blondies were synonymous with lame in my mind. As my sister put it:

           "booooooooooooooooooo,
            blondies.
            yaaaaayyyyyyyy,
            blondie.
            (the band)."

I was in full agreement with this poetic little statement until around 10pm last night. Blondies always just seemed like a poor excuse for brownies, with all the butterfat and none of the joy. A comment on the TWD site the other day helped me begin my mental shift, by pointing out that blondies are just cookies in bar form. Conceiving of my creation as just a differently shaped chocolate chip cookied sorted me right out. Dorie describes these particular blondies as having more fillings than dough. I didn't have most of her suggested fillings (butterscotch chips, coconut) on hand, so I made a quick batch of toffee, and threw that in with chocolate chunks from one of those great big Trader Joes bars and some slivered almonds and Spanish peanuts. (Spanish peanuts, incidentally, are one of my more recent grocery finds. How I lived without them always on hand is hazy now.)

The toffee melted away, leaving the finished bars sticky, chewy, oozy at room temperature, and irresistable frozen. To top off the overkill, we ate them with noyaux ice cream that I made by infusing the cream with crushed cherry and apricot pits. The ice cream was subtle, but we could really taste the noyaux, in an almost citrusy aftertweak that went right up the nose. Lily, my boss at the bakery, thought it tasted something like marzipan.