Blond Marbled Brownies

The best of both worlds - blondies and brownies marbled together! Could it get better? For me, yes - these fantastic brownies are made with oil, so they are low in saturated fat too. The recipe isn't perfect, but it's close and won't need much adjusting to get it nearer.

My inspiration came from Bakeaholic, but the recipe can be traced back another couple of steps by following links on each site. As I didn't follow the recipe quantities exactly, and  plan to make more changes next time, I'm going to write out the whole recipe.

The biggest problem was the huge difference in stiffness between the chocolate batter and the plain half. The blondie batter was quite runny, but the chocolate batter was almost like cookie dough and very difficult to spread - it will need loosening up next time!

Ingredients
150g sunflower oil
450g light muscovado sugar
330g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 large eggs
100g plain chocolate chips
50g chopped hazelnuts
35g cocoa
50g 74% plain chocolate, melted.


Method
Preheat the oven to 170C and line a 12 x 8" (30 x 20cm) baking tin with baking parchment. The tin needs to be at least 1.5"+ (4cm) deep.

Mix the oil and sugar until smooth, making sure there are no lumps in the sugar.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time.

Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt and stir into the batter.

Divide the batter into two fairly equal halves and stir the chocolate chips and nuts into one half. To the other half, add the cocoa and melted chocolate and mix until well blended. (This results in a really stiff batter, I think if I were doing this again I would add a little milk to thin it down a bit.)

Place alternate blobs of batter into the baking tin - using the thickest batter first, if there is a difference, and allowing the thinner batter to spread between these blobs. Use a knife or spoon handle to swirl the blobs together to create a marbled effect.

Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a probe comes out with damp crumbs clinging to it. (I underbaked mine - the blondie mixture was too gooey in centre pieces after cooking, as you can see in the photo above! I would add another 5 minutes and bake for 40 minutes next time.)

Cool in the tin then cut into the desired size - I cut into 24 small squares.

The brownies rose during cooking, but sank back when cooled to give the right degree of fudgy chewiness. Despite the large amount of sugar they did not taste oversweet. The chocolate chips and nuts gave a texture contrast, but the overall flavour depended on the variations of the amount of blondie or brownie you got in each piece!

This is definitely a recipe to keep and make again, if I can sort out the chocolate batter stiffness, although it doesn't appear to have affected the final outcome.