Lower sugar brown butter blondies are chewy to the max

These low sugar brown butter blondies are addictively chewy from brown butter, loaded with chocolate chips and butterscotch taste with just enough sugar to get the perfect shiny crackly top.

Here’s the deal. I hate traditional brownies and blondies. They are loaded with unholy amounts of sugar that I’ve never been comfortable dumping in my brownies.

Sure that sugar gives you a gorgeous shiny crinkly top that everyone loves about brownies, but eat one and you’re in instant sugar crash. I personally do not like to feel that kind of sloggy, buzzy feeling you get in your head. I’ve been experimenting over the years to figure out a way to reduce the sugar. The results have produced both black bean brownies and white bean blondies, which are much beloved in our house, but these more traditional brown butter blondies have also come out of my mad scientist time.

Using a trick I always use to dissolve sugar in eggs, these easy bar cookies come together without too much fuss. They’re a great addition to any Christmas cookie collection, and they’re ultra portable for picnics, potlucks, or sports team treats.

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Lower sugar brown butter blondies

Blondies are a brownie’s the less chocolatey cousin

I like to think of blondies as inside out brownies. Instead of a chocolate batter with chocolate chips added, a blondie is a vanilla batter with added chocolate. You can think of them as a chocolate chip cookie in bar cookie form, but they’re a little cooler than that.

Why you’ll love these bars

• CHEWY: Using the brown butter makes for a toothy chew that’s absolutely delicious.
• Butterscotch heaven: the combo of brown butter and brown sugar give you the awesome butterscotch flavor of a good blondie.
• Cut em thin and you win: These are on the thinner side of blondies. I love this because eating one is not so overwhelming.
• Casual: outside of making sure the brown butter doesn’t burn, you can make these along side whatever else you’re making in the kitchen. The active time you need to make these is not much. They’re great to make if you’re having people over for dinner and you want to make a dessert but don’t have much extra time. There’s plenty of baking recipes where you have 16 different things happening at once, but this ain’t it.
• Pantry recipe: There’s no fancy ingredients here. You probably have everything.
• Less sugar: as promised, I cut the sugar down by 1/3 from a typical blondies recipe. If you ever get that “Ugh, I just ate a brownie feeling,” you will not get nearly as bad of that feeling with this recipe.
• Customize: To make blondies without chocolate chips is unthinkable to me, but outside of that, you could add chopped nuts, chunks of chocolate, M&Ms, just about whatever you like. I like no more than 1 cup of total mix-ins. So if I use 1/2 cup of chocolate, add 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans. Simple.

Why brown butter? What does brown butter do for brown butter blondies?

Brown butter is butter that has been melted and cooked so that the milk solids in the butter brown. When you use it, here’s what you get:

1. Flavor: Brown butter gives baked goods a more complex, nutty flavor.
2. Texture: Some of the water content of the water evaporates in the cooking process of brown butter. Because of this, the batter is more dehydrated than it would be if you just used plain melted butter. Sometimes you don’t want that because it could lead to having a too dried out baked good. In this case, with a thin blondie, the batter bakes quickly enough that the lack of moisture gives us chewiness and not dryness.

My secret trick for getting a shiny crust blondie with less sugar

You can’t get away with cutting down the sugar to zero for a blondie. You’ll get a funky bread, not a blondie.

That’s because the shiny top IS sugar. In the process of baking, the sugar melts, then recrystallizes into a thin shiny sheet.

Dissolved sugar: The trick to getting a shiny top is for the sugar to be dissolved well. Ultra fine sugars like powdered sugars help here because they dissolve well. Adam Ragusea has a very helpful video if you want to deep dive into the food science of this.

My personal trick is to do what I always do when making meringue: dissolve the sugar into eggs over heat. Using a double boiler, whisking the eggs with powdered sugar and heavy, much harder to dissolve brown sugar over a couple minutes gives you the kind of glossy, well-dissolved sugar that we want here.

Yes, it’s true that the eggs then need to cool down before you add the chocolate, but so does the brown butter. This is why I said this is a recipe you can do in the background of other kitchen projects. Simply give the butter and egg mix a whisk, then casually mix it occasionally as it cools. When it’s thick and no longer warm, fold in the flour and chocolate and get those blondies in the oven.

Brown butter blondies ingredients

• Butter: use unsalted here. Browning salted butter can concentrate that salty taste in a not tasty way. If all you have is salted butter, don’t add more in the batter.
• Brown sugar: adds the butterscotchy taste.
• Powdered sugar: finely milled sugar that helps you easily get the shiny crust.
• Whole egg and an egg yolk: By taking the white out of one of the eggs, you dehydrate the batter slightly, again helping with the shiny crust.
• Salt: for flavor.
• Baking powder: for lift.
• Vanilla paste: to boost the butterscotch flavor. You can use vanilla extract as well.
• Flour: all-purpose to hold the blondie matrix together.
• Chocolate chips: use what you like here. I prefer dark chocolate chips or chopped chunks from a 70% dark chocolate bar, but you do you. Often I use what I have on hand, and you should too.

Process for making blondies

1. Brown: Melt and cook down the butter until you get those lovely brown flecks and things start to smell nutty.
2. Whisk: in a double boiler, whisk the eggs, sugar and salt and baking powder together until the brown sugar is well-dissolved.
3. Cool: Mix the brown butter and sugar/egg mix together with vanilla in a mixing bowl, then let cool.
4. Fold: When the sugar/butter mix is thick and no longer warm, fold in the flour and chocolate chips.
5. Bake: Spread out the batter in your baking pan, then put these guys in your oven.
6. Cool: cool down the baked blondies completely.
7. Cut: With a sharp knife, cut your blondies into squares. Use a damp paper towel in between cuts for the cleanest cuts.

Tips for the best brown butter blondies

• Low heat!!: Use low heat when you make the brown butter. The butter can go from perfectly browned to burnt in a very short time frame. Using low heat gives you a little more time to work. From someone who has burned countless sticks of butter, using the low heat is worth spending a couple extra minutes on this process.
• Help! My butter split!: Don’t worry if as you mix the butter and egg/sugar mix together if it doesn’t come together at first. Keep whisking periodically as it cools, and it’ll all come together into a thick lovely glossy sugar goo.
• Cool it down, or don’t: If the sugar and butter is too hot, the chocolate chips will melt when you fold them in. This can be cool if you want to make a kind of swirly marbled looking bar cookie. If you want defined chunks of chocolate, definitely cool down everything until it’s no longer warm to the touch.

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