Blondie Baking Adventure

We went to a small barbecue recently, and I decided I'd bake something to take along. As we also had quite a bit of chocolate candy in the house, it seemed like a good idea to use some of it up. So I settled on blondies with chopped chocolate mix-ins (including Cadbury eggs, Hershey kisses and one Russell Stover caramel pumpkin).

When I went to the grocery store to buy sugar, I decided not to get the huge bag of brown sugar. Instead, I bought red sugar (which was in fact brown in color). I'm sure I've used red sugar before in the past, but I don't think I will again. It was fairly lumpy, and some of the lumps were so hard that they wouldn't mix into the batter completely.

So, as I baked the blondies, the red sugar lumps began to caramelize and sometimes burn just a bit. The sugar also gave the blondies are darker appearance and a bit of a molasses-like flavor, which was nice. It would probably be good in Christmas cake or gingerbread, though you'd need to find a way to get the lumps out.