I’m sure this must happen to other people but I am always amazed at how quickly the year disappears. It seems I have blinked and missed the summer almost entirely. It felt so autumnal one morning this week that I started to panic. I changed the main page picture on the blog to reflect mid-summer raspberry making in an attempt to capture the last moments of sunshine (and because I was rather over those madeleines) but it made me wonder, where has the year gone? I realise quite a lot of it was spent at my desk, thinking and writing but even the last month, sans-PhD, has flown.

My mom was here visiting and that went past like a whirlwind and now it is nearly September and I am starting to prepare for a conference and wondering where? where did the time go?

I realise this is a random introduction to a post on white chocolate blondies but it has been on my mind for a while now. If anyone has any ideas of how I can recover from the speed of this year, let me know. But in the meantime, I’m going to tell you about these blondies. I’m so officially obsessed with them that I got up early (early!) on my day off so I could tell you all about them. (Maybe that is the key to more time? Become an early riser? I am by nature a night owl but am always striving to get up early in the mornings, it is a quiet time of day that I like so much but rarely manage to see. I don’t know? Maybe?)

The key genius of this recipe is that you brown the butter. Yes, I know, we’ve talked about brown butter before but brown butter and slightly caramelised white chocolate is a thing of magic in a way I did not fully understand before. So you cook the butter until the milk solids have split out and started to sputter and fizz and then you just keep the pot on the stove, cooking away until the butter turns a lovely nut-brown colour and smells nutty. Then you add in half the white chocolate and allow it to sit in the butter whilst the butter cools and you assemble the rest of the batter. The resulting blondie is squidgy, fudgy, gloriously caramel in flavour with the odd white chocolate chip for additional sweet creaminess and raspberry for tartness. Make it now!

Raspberry White Chocolate Blondie
Adapted from Olive Magazine
200g butter, unsalted
150g white chocolate, chopped roughly
200g light brown sugar
100g golden caster sugar
3 eggs
100g buckwheat flour
100g rice flour
a pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g frozen raspberries

Preheat the oven to 170C. Line a brownie tray with parchment – I use a tray that is 27cm x 20cm.

Place the butter in a saucepan and cook over a medium heat until the butter is brown and smells nutty. Remove from the heat. Add in half the white chocolate and leave to cool.
Whisk the sugars and eggs together until slightly pale and thick.
In a separate bowl, place the flours and salt together. Add the vanilla into the egg mixture then fold in the flour.

Pour the butter mixture into the batter and fold in. The batter is quite thick. Break the raspberries up a little with your hands and stir half into the batter.

Pour the batter into your lined baking tin and scatter the rest of the raspberries and white chocolate on top.

Bake for approximately 45 minutes, until the blondie no longer wobbles at the centre and a skewer inserted comes out clean.

Allow to cool before slicing and eating.