Cream Cheese Swirl Blondies (Pg 275)

This one was quite a challenge for me for a couple of reasons:

1) I had never made a blondie before, or for that matter, blondie's dark sister, brownie.

2) My food allergies kept me from taste-testing these: I'm allergic to dairy, but for some reason have been able to eat eggs and butter, but cream cheese is still a no-no.

So I really had no idea what I was doing, but that was part of the fun. The blondie dough (the cakey part) for some reason came out too dry so it was difficult to work with. I was supposed to smooth the blondie dough in the baking pan and then swirl dollops of it with dollops of the cream cheese batter. Uhmmmm....ok.

As I mentioned, the dough was too dry, and the cream cheese batter was too wet. The cream cheese I was using was different than what you'd imagine - it's a straight from the farm cream cheese, not packaged Philadelphia stuff, so the consistency was a lot thinner, almost like yogurt.

Needless to say, this was quite a mess. This is what it looked like before baking:

YUM! I was pretty discouraged at this point, but I kept my faith. I know that baked goods go into the oven and come out a completely different creature, so I was hoping the baking process would make some sense out of the mess. I had also had a little taste of the blondie dough and it tasted really good, so I was hoping the cream cheese part also tasted good, and I knew at this point I had nothing to lose.

It took a lot longer to bake than it should have, probably cos the gooey cream cheese part was so....gooey. And so the outer edges started burning a little by the time the center was completely baked. Sigh. I still had a little bit of hope.

Once it was completely cooled I chopped it into bars, cutting off the burnt edges, of course. And they looked a little weird, but not bad. Of course, I couldn't try one. They seem like they might be ok. The jury is still out. If and when someone eats one I will certainly let you know.