Easter baking

It's the long Easter weekend, and I'm finally getting around to doing some (light) baking. I'm also very excited because I've just got a copy of  Claire Saffitz's Dessert Person, and  it looks fantastic. I've got very little energy at the moment, partly from being ill, and partly from having done a whole heap of DIY stuff today, but having a stand mixer and a dishwasher is like having a cheat mode for simple baking. I happened to pick up some halvah with cocoa in Lidl the other day, so I thought I'd give this recipe from my new book a go, despite the fact that I really don't like white chocolate.

Salted Halvah Blondies

Ingredients

• 170g White chocolate
• 115g Unsalted butter
• 70g Tahini
• 100g Dark brown sugar
• 1 Egg
• 2 Egg yolks
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract
• 165g Plain flour
• 3g Salt
• 1/2 tsp Baking powder
• 115g Halvah
• Sesame seeds
• Flaked salt

Method

1. Melt the white chocolate, butter and tahini together in the microwave.
2. Whisk the sugar in using a stand mixer. Add the egg, egg yolks and vanilla extract and whisk on medium-high until thick, smooth and glossy.
3. Fold in the flour, salt and baking powder using a spatula.
4. Crumble in the halvah and fold in gently.
5. Spread out into a greased, foil-lined tin.
6. Sprinkle top with sesame seeds and flaked salt.
7. Bake at ~175C for 20 minutes until golden brown around the edges and slightly jiggly in the centre.
8. Remove from oven and allow to cool fully in the tin before removing and slicing.

As you can see, it's a pretty thick batter.

I almost forgot to sprinkle the sesame seeds and salt over the top before it went in the oven.

A rare occasion where the oven glass is clean enough to take an awfully blurry in-progress shot!

And fresh from the oven!

The finished article.

These are really quite good. They are hideously rich - incredibly fatty and perhaps bordering on greasy at times - but also delicious. You can really taste the sesame - the sesame flavour is really strong (in a good way). I'm not always a huge fan of salted desserts, but this time around, it's just perfect - the salt helps cut through the fat and the sesame, and just stops it from being too cloying. And you can't really taste the white chocolate at all, but it absolutely adds to the richness and smoothness of this. You also can't really detect the halva - I wonder if I crumbled it up a bit too small; I think the idea was that you'd come across chunks of halva, much as you would with chocolate chunks in brownies. But overall, this was lovely - as someone who's never been much of a fan of blondies, this recipe stands out as one of the best I've had.