Ingredients For Checkerboard Chocolate & Blonde Brownies

Series Summary

Brownies have been tempting us to abandon our diets for generations now. The classic chocolate brownie, sometimes referred to as a Boston brownie, is a small chocolate cake slice, generally very rich in flavor and sometimes covered with fudge or icing. Some recipes call for chocolate chips or nuts, such as walnuts or almonds. Legend has it that the brownie was born when a careless cook forgot the baking powder in the batter for a chocolate cake, while other stories credit the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago with its invention. Several different brownie recipes and flavors are popular today, from the pre-mixed box variety to specialty gourmet bakery conceived desserts with rare and decadent ingredients.

In this series of free video baking lessons, you’ll learn a recipe for blonde brownies, or blondies, which are brownies made with brown sugar, and often white chocolate instead of cocoa. Expert Helen McMahon demonstrates step-by-step how to make this variation on the classic brownie recipe. She’ll show you the ingredients and bakeware you’ll need to get started, like a mixer and baking pan, and offer tips and techniques for mixing a smooth batter and getting it to spread evenly in the pan. After the baking process she shows you how to cut the brownies and mix them with a tray of classic chocolate brownies to create a checkerboard effect for a beautiful presentation.

This series is an Equilibrio Films production.

Video Transcript

" I’m Helen McMahon for Expert Village. Today we’re going to do something quite interesting which will be a great holiday treat. You’ve all made chocolate brownies at one time or another, and there are many variations on theme, but we’re going to combine them with blonde brownies and make a checker board design. Here’s how we’re going to do it. First of all you need to set the oven for 350 degrees so the oven will come to full temperature when you’re ready to put your brownies in the oven. And we start out with one stick of butter or margarine; it should be somewhat soft, so if you take it out of the refrigerator beforehand, it will be just at the right temperature. If it’s still very hard, then you might want to just melt it a little bit. I’ll get that butter started… So you start creaming the butter, and then you take two good sized eggs and let those beat with the butter as it’s creaming."