White chocolate baking extravaganza

On one of my days off last week I took the opportunity to bake. I felt like I hadn't baked anything in a while (a week with no baking is a long time for me!) so I made TWO lovely baked goods! I was having a browse through my most favourite cookbook ever, The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, and I couldn't decide between the blondies and the white chocolate and pecan cookies. Since they both used a lot of the same ingredients (butter, flour, sugars, white chocolate & nuts), I decided to try them both. I'm normally more of a darker chocolate girl and I love love love brownies and double chocolate cookies, but for some reason I was in the mood for terribly sweet white chocolate treats.

First up, white chocolate & pecan cookies. These involve making up the dough, stirring in chopped up white chocolate and pecans, then moulding the dough into log shapes in clingfilm and freezing for an hour or so. Then you slice the cookies and put them straight onto a baking tray into the oven. I really liked this method because it meant that all of the cookies were the same shape and size (okay, except for the odd one...). They were really delicious and easy to make, I might try using the same dough recipe but adding dark chocolate and hazelnuts. Yum.

Then, I made the blondies. These are made in the same way as brownies, in that you melt the chocolate & butter together then add the other ingredients to the wet mix. The thing with white chocolate though is that it doesn't melt in the same way as milk or dark chocolate, because it doesn't contain any cocoa solids, just cocoa butter. Because of this it can split easily and look really oily with the melted butter. I mixed it in with the eggs anyway and it turned out okay. I'm a bit unsure about these really. The white chocolate didn't add too much to the taste of the blondie other than make it super sweet. I think that Rachel Allen's peanut butter & white chocolate blondies were nicer (perhaps because I love peanut butter so much!).

I would love to share these recipes with you, but I think I've shared enough recipes from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook and I don't want to get done for copyright or anything! Plus I would like to encourage you all to buy it because it such a GREAT cookbook, I really don't think I could live without it now (and no, I'm not being paid by them or anything hah).

So, I'm not sure I would make the blondies again but definitely the cookies, because the dough is a good base for any other mixtures. I think I'll stick with my dark chocolate brownies thanks. Do you prefer dark or white chocolate? I do like white chocolate, don't get me wrong, but it seemed a bit flavourless and oversweet in these recipes. And it's not real chocolate is it?