Ginger Chocolate Squares

This is an adaptation of Martha Stewart's recipe for White Chocolate-Gingerbread Blondies. I'm not going to call them blondies, because even baking the mixture in a tin only 2/3 of the stipulated size, the result was no thicker than a cookie. I halved the ingredients in the recipe, then baked in an 8" square tin, for 35 minutes. Instead of 5 oz (150g) of white chocolate I used 100g of dark chocolate chips and 5 nuggets of stem ginger, chopped into pieces. I also doubled the ground ginger in the recipe.

Here's my ingredient list, 'translated' to metric weights:

190g plain flour

1/2 + 1/8 tsp bicarbonate of soda

pinch salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1tsp ground ginger

1/8 tsp ground cloves

150g butter

155g light brown sugar

70g caster sugar

1 medium egg + 1 egg yolk

1 tsp vanilla extract

55g black treacle

100g plain chocolate chips

5 nuggets stem ginger, chopped to a similar size to the chocolate chips.

The result was a dense, gooey, cookie-like chewy bar, with crisper outside edges where the mixture had risen during cooking, then collapsed back when cooling. Despite the use of treacle, which has a bitter edge to its flavour, the bars were very sweet; if I bake these again I will use a better quality plain chocolate bar which is lower in sugar than the chocolate chips. From the point of view of our personal tastes, I was right to increase the ground ginger.