Caramel Apple Blondies

Now that I have a total of 8 apples, 6 Fuji from the orchard and 2 Gala lying around in the house, I have to use them before they rot.  The answer? Baking of course!  I wanted to bake blondies with apples in the middles, but I did not find a recipe for that, so I modified one by Chocolate with Grace to produce Caramel Apple Blondies; a caramel, apple gooeyness that is to be desired by all!

A layer of blondies, followed by a layer of caramel and sautéed apples, and a blondie coating to finish.  How can you say no to this?

Now that you know you will never be able to resist, here's the recipe!

Caramel Apple Blondies:

Yield: about 16 blondies

Ingredients:

1 cup butter

1 3/4 cup granulate sugar

1/4 cup and 1 tbsp brown sugar

2 eggs

1 7/8 cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

4 apples--I used 2 Gala and 2 Fuji

3 tbsp caramel--I used Smucker's sea salt caramel ice cream topping

Instructions:

1) Melt all but 1 tbsp of the butter in microwave

2) Beat butter, the granulated sugar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, and eggs together

3) Add in cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and flour.  It was not every cinnamon-y, so if you really like cinnamon, I would definitely double it.

4) Spread about 3/4 of the mixture on the bottom of a 9x17" brownie pan.  Place batter on the bottom, and using a spatula press down on the batter to spread it out, making sure it is not too thin as you don't want the bottom to crumble away.

5) Spread the caramel on top of the dough

6) Peel and core the apples, and cut them into pieces as desired

7) Sautée the apples with 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp brown sugar.  This step is important to make sure that the apple are nice and soft.

8) Spread the apples on top of the caramel

9) Take little pieces of the dough, and places them on top of the apples. Press down to spread.  The dough will start to be coated with caramel.  The dough will not cover the top of the apples, but don't worry, the dough will spread as it bakes!

10) Bake for 30 minutes at 350, then for 5 minutes at 275.  Look at your bars to determine if the top if crispy or not.  I turned it down because I didn't want the top of the bars to burn as they were already crispy after 30 minutes.  However, I wanted to make sure they were fully baked so I left them in the oven at a lower temperature.  You can also stick a toothpick through the bars, and if the bottom seems hard you can probably pull them out.

To give you an idea of how mine looked after various steps, look below:

 This is how it looks after adding the apples.  You can see the dough and caramel with the apples on top.  I would suggest that you don't spread the caramel and apples *all* the way the sides of the pan, for an easier to eat blondie, and an easier to clean up pan.

 Here is how mine looked before baking.  You can see that the dough did not cover the top of the apples by any means, and that they were coated with caramel.

Last, this is how the blondies look when they came out of the oven.  The dough mostly covered the top of the apples, and is a bit crackled.  I love the look of this!  You can also see where the caramel seeped through the dough.

Now that you've read this, you can go ahead and try them for yourself!  I might just have to bake another batch of these later this week.  

Happy baking!