This week's Baked Sunday Mornings recipe is Sunrise Key Lime Tarts, individual key lime tartlets with a pretzel crust. I made these delicious tarts (pictured below) back in October and you can read my post about them here. I didn't have time to make the tarts again -- but since it is Baked Sunday Mornings, I'll write about another recipe from the Baked boys that I happened to make last week: the Brewer's Blondies from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking.
I'm generally not a big fan of blondies, but I thought this recipe looked interesting because it includes malt powder and malt balls. It's also one of the quicker and easier recipes from the Baked books. All you have to do is beat softened butter and dark brown sugar; add eggs and vanilla; incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt, malted milk powder); and stir in chopped malt balls, chocolate chips, and walnuts. You spread the batter into a pan and bake. While the recipe says that these taste great warm, I let mine cool fully before cutting them.
The blondies had a nice golden color and were chock full of chocolate and nuts. They also had a nice moist, chewy texture. They tasted fine. But I found them disappointing; they didn't have much malt flavor. I had even purposely chopped my malt balls by hand instead of putting them in the food processor so that I could keep the pieces larger and hopefully get more crunch and malt ball flavor, but you couldn't even tell the bars had malt balls in them.
The recipe headnote says that at the bakery, Matt and Renato use brewer's malt (malted barley) from a local brewery to make the brewer's blondies, and that there is a vast difference between brewer's malt and malted milk powder. It does make me wonder what a real brewer's blondie tastes like, but the homemade version didn't do much for me.
Recipes:
I'm generally not a big fan of blondies, but I thought this recipe looked interesting because it includes malt powder and malt balls. It's also one of the quicker and easier recipes from the Baked books. All you have to do is beat softened butter and dark brown sugar; add eggs and vanilla; incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt, malted milk powder); and stir in chopped malt balls, chocolate chips, and walnuts. You spread the batter into a pan and bake. While the recipe says that these taste great warm, I let mine cool fully before cutting them.
The blondies had a nice golden color and were chock full of chocolate and nuts. They also had a nice moist, chewy texture. They tasted fine. But I found them disappointing; they didn't have much malt flavor. I had even purposely chopped my malt balls by hand instead of putting them in the food processor so that I could keep the pieces larger and hopefully get more crunch and malt ball flavor, but you couldn't even tell the bars had malt balls in them.
The recipe headnote says that at the bakery, Matt and Renato use brewer's malt (malted barley) from a local brewery to make the brewer's blondies, and that there is a vast difference between brewer's malt and malted milk powder. It does make me wonder what a real brewer's blondie tastes like, but the homemade version didn't do much for me.
Recipes:
- "Sunrise Key Lime Tarts" from Baked Elements: Our 10 Favorite Ingredients, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. Recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.
- "Brewer's Blondies" from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. Recipe available here.
Comments
I adore the Brewer's Blondies too. I made them last year for the first time, and I'll make them again next month for an event. One of these days I will get around to writing a blog post about them... I would recommend trying Non-Diastatic Malt Powder, rather than Malted Milk Powder. It's "true" malt powder with a much stronger flavor-- there's even a blog post about it on BAKED. You can order it from King Arthur Flour, and it really amps up the malt flavor!