When the brownies start to brown, just lay a sheet of foil over the top of the pan to retard further browning.

What oven rack are you using when baking? I suspect they say not to brown it so that they stay looking 'blonde'. FWIW, the blonde brownie recipe I use isn't anything like yours, but the recipe states to bake it at 350F for 20-25 mins.

I would probably divide the batter into two eight inch square pans and bake at 325 for 20 minutes.

A big part of the issue might be all the checking. You must know the old saw--I think it comes from Texas: If you're looking it ain't cooking.

I've never been a big fan of temperature based cooking/baking. I don't doubt the science behind it, but I think it needs to be tempered, like a piano. There are shades and harmonics and all that stuff. ;) The only thing I've found it really reliable for is bread. For meat, it's a great indicator of underdone in the middle, but for just how done, it seems off. Same for baking sweets.

The uncertainty about oven temperature in the recipe is probably do to the variability of ovens, and how well their owners preheat them.

I don't know this particular recipe, but brownies in general are low rise, very moist cakes, or tall, wet cookies. :) The toothpick in the middle should come out damp with some crumbs, not wet coated with batter, and there shouldn't be a big difference between the toothpick and the thermometer probe, though the latter, because it's slick, will likely have fewer or smaller crumbs. It should also just be starting to pull away from the sides.

Ruthanna's suggestion is good, especially if the people you're serving like edges. The trick to any kind of cake is getting the middle cooked through, and splitting it makes that easier. OTOH, people have been making 9"x13" pans of brownies for a century at least. Are you using aluminum or Pyrex?

ruthanna, I thought of that too but figured since it's an old family favorite recipe that it *should* be coming out correctly in the 9x13. :)

What kind of pan, glass or???? Maybe try the opposite of what you are using.

Sometimes, there's more to family recipes than meets the eye. As a young teen, I followed one of my grandmother's pie recipes and the outer crust was done but it wasn't done enough in the center. When I complained to my mom about it, she asked, "You used the baking ring, didn't you?" My reply was, "Huh?"

It looked like this but in those days, without a non-stick coating:

https://www.amazon.com/2737-Stick-Oven-Guard-Drip/dp/B003YHCVPS/ref=sr_1_7?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1471463259&sr=1-7&keywords=drip+catchers

All the women in our family used them both for pies and layer cakes. I thought they were just for catching drips but they actually help to balance out baking heat between the center and the edges.

If followed my old family recipe for cheesecake as written without using one, it would crack.

The pan could be the issue. I have made casseroles for the freezer or baked a cake or brownies in a foil pan and they always take significantly longer than if I made them in a regular metal pan. Glass also bakes differently.

Your recipe is nearly the same as the one I grew up with for chocolate brownies but substitutes 3/4 cup white chips for 4 oz unsweetened chocolate. My reccipe bakes at 350 for 25 minutes pretty dependably. Chips are about 6 oz to a cup, so that isn't a significant difference in amount, but it does add some additional sugar and different forms of fat.

I just reread the recipe (the format makes it hard to be sure) but it looks like you don't have any leavening. My recipe uses 1 tsp of salt and 1 tsp baking powder. Have you ever bake anything with baking powder that has gone bad? It totally changes the texture anad the way it bakes -- never seeming right. I think you are lacking baking powder. If the flavor was right, I would add 1 tsp of baking powder. If it seemed like it needed something, I'd add a little salt too.

ruthanna_gw your story reminds me of one I heard some time ago. Making a roast for a family get together, a woman cut both ends off and put it in her roasting pan. A friend asked her why she did that and the woman replied that that was how her mother always did it. Later she asked her mother about it and her mother said it was because HER mother always did it that way. They went and asked grandma about it and grandma said " Oh,I had to cut the ends off so it would fit in my pan".

My brownie recipe doesn't contain leavening....they are wonderful chewey and fudgey...not at all cak-ey.

I don't do much baking other than holiday cookies. I like Paula Deen's recipe for pound cake that starts in a cold oven and SAYS bake about 105 minutes at a relatively low temp... can't remember right off hand. First time I made this it looked FABULOUS when I opened the door at end of cooking time but was still VERY wobbly in center (bundt pan). I probably cooked it at least another 20-30 minutes before it was "done"?? First thought was oven temp was off, so next time I was using oven, stuck oven thermometer in there, too. It said pretty much what it was set at? I final came to the conclusion that baking time difference was because I was using JUMBO eggs. Almost every recipe calls for LARGE... 5 JUMBOS is significantly more liquid than 2 LARGE?!?

Well, I can see why you had trouble reading the recipe. It looked properly formatted when I hit send, at least I think it did. I was in a hurry to post because my plate was full today.

Because I was sending these somewhere, I cooked them in a foil pan this time. I usually cook the brownies in a glass pan Pyrex dish. For some reason, I believe I was told to do that, although it is not in the recipe. Either way, I get stressed over the batter taking way longer to cook than the recipe states. Do you think I ought to try it in a metal pan? I never thought of that! I've always cooked regular brownies in a glass dish.

I use a thermometer because I hate the inexactness of "cook until it looks ____"

White Chocolate Brownies

INGREDIENTS

Brownies

1 cup butter (2 sticks)

3/4 cup white chocolate chips

4 eggs, beaten

2 cups sugar

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted

1 teaspoon vanilla

Icing

1/2 cup butter (1 stick)

1/2 cup white chocolate chips

3 cups powdered sugar, sifted

2 tablespoons half & half (more may be needed to achieve the correct consistency)

1 teaspoon vanilla

INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

For the brownies, melt butter & white chocolate in microwave using 30 second intervals or in the top of double boiler. Remove from heat & pour into large bowl. Mix in eggs and slowly add sugar. Add flour and vanilla. Pour mixture into greased & floured 9x13 inch pan. Bake 30-35 minutes.

Start watching after 20 minutes so that the brownies don't brown too much. May be necessary to turn down the temp, too. Allow to cool and spread with white chocolate icing.

For the icing, melt butter & white chocolate in microwave or double boiler. Remove from heat. Beat in the powdered sugar, half & half, and vanilla. Spread over cooled brownies. If icing is hard to spread, use CLEAN hands to kind of pat it out. The warmth of your hands will help the icing be more pliable.

Tip: if you chill them in refrigerator, they are very easy to cut.

Linda's gone back to sniping at my every utterance. Sigh. Cake as in a batter you pour in a pan and bake. As opposed to bar cookie which is a dough you press into a pan and bake.

Bbstx, Most people I know (including me) use Pyrex. It is going to have different timing than disposable foil. But I've made cocoa powder brownies and blondies without cocoa powder, but never blond brownies with white chocolate, which has more fat, which probably affects the bake enough to make the timing not comparable.

Regarding the timing, that's never precise in a recipe. A highly tested one, like Betty Crocker, is adjusted to be the most easily replicated in a variety of home kitchens. The reason a lot of those classic recipes taste kind of generic is so they can be made that way. Grandma's recipes, on the other hand, are just what Grandma did. If you're lucky. I have some of my mother's recipes--especially ones that are out of books or magazines rather than ones passed down or invented by her--which she didn't actually make like it says on the page! Your oven and the originating oven may be very different.

So, when there's a sale at the big box store, stock up on the ingredients. Preheat the oven for an hour. Put the brownies in your regular pan in for exactly 35 minutes without checking. Unless they're extremely not cooked (situation A, put them back in until you think they're okay and skip to A below), take them out and cool on a rack as usual. THEN test them. That is, cut and serve. If they're undercooked, go to A below. If they're just right (situation C), you have your time and temperature, so skip to C below. If they're overcooked (situation B), skip to B below.

A) Second try, preheat the oven for an hour, and bake for 40 minutes.

B) Second try, preheat the oven for an hour, and bake for 30 minutes.

Wash, rinse, repeat. Or vary the temperature up or down 10 degrees.

C) Once you zero in on the exact right time and temperature, use your probe thermometer to measure the internal temperate at the center, well up from the bottom and down from the top (as you know), to learn what your target temperature should be.

Scientific method may mean you're giving away a number of batches of imperfect brownies, but at least you'll get truly real numbers that you'll be able to rely upon in the future, translate to disposable pans using your thermometer, and pass down to your kids.

plllog, I think you're being oversensitive here. I see lindac's comment as directed at lascatx, who suggested adding baking powder, which would make the brownies more cake-y instead of the more traditional fudge-y.

oh, pulllog, I'm afraid I'll be eating the test batches instead of giving them away, but for the sake of science, I'll sacrifice! :-)

Thanks to all of you for your help and comments. I know time and temperatures vary, but my time seems to be so far off that of the recipe. When a recipe calls for 30- 35 minutes, I don't expect it to take close to an hour.

I've had things in foil pans take 50% longer to nearly twice as long to bake -- especially something like a lasagna.

Wow! lascatx, I guess I've never paid attention before. Perhaps that is why my frozen lasagna is sometimes soupy!

For disposable pans, I much prefer the Glad Ovenware to foil pans, but my local store doesn't carry them anymore. And the large size is odd - 9x12 instead of 9x13. I think I'll order some from Amazon right now to have on hand!

I didn't know that foil pans take longer to bake. I don't use foil, but I'll definitely keep it in mind, if I do!

I make one recipe of brownies, one from Fine Cooking. It's wonderful, and it doesn't use any leavening.

I made it in my glass dish and it too, took a long time to cook, so I bought a metal baking pan, just for these brownies as, in my mind, they'd brown better in metal.

I would think that 350 would be correct temp for baking brownies. You say your oven is calibrated. OK so do you have a thermometer inside of the oven and are you sure it's up to temp before you put the dish in to bake? Do not go by the beep your oven makes that tries to make you think it's hot, this is not accurate. My oven beeps and says it's up to temp but it is nowhere near hot enough. I do not put anything in the oven until my thermometer that I place on them oven rack says it's 350! This normally takes 15 minute or even more sometimes.

When I bake in disposable pans I usually place then on my pizza stone.

Seems to help with even cooking.

AR, I let the oven preheat for at least 30 minutes. I don't keep a thermometer in the oven, but I have used it. The calibration was done by the GE tech using a thermocouple. He also let it heat for 30 minutes. It had to cycle on and off 4 times before he could get an accurate reading, he told me. I watched the thermocouple gauge while it was heating. Wow! It went over 400 degrees a couple of times then down to the low 300s before it finally settled down to 350.

Thanks for the pizza stone tip, Cindy. I used to use mine all the time when I had a gas oven. Now that I have electric, I haven't used it except for pizza. I'll have to drag it out next time I cook in a foil pan.

ah... I have *never* baked anything in a foil / disposable pan!

bbstx, regarding your oven calibration, all I can think of is Lisa's line from 'My Cousin Vinny'. :)

Because a split second before the torque wrench was applied to the
faucet handle, it had been calibrated by top members of the state AND
federal Department of Weights and Measures... to be dead on balls
accurate!

Hilarious, party!

I saw those Glad pans but had some foil ones on hand so thought I would wait to try them. Haven't seen them again.

I had two events that started me keeping foil pans on hand -- first, the son who is now in grad school took a Texas Sheet cake into school for some special event in a class and it got such a great reception that he wanted to take it in again for the end of school. asomehow that morphed into taking cake in for each class on the day of the final to have after they finished. Might have had something to do with girls loving the chocolate. ;-) Anyway, with 7 classes and one of them being band, we baked a lot of cakes in pans I didn't want to have to worry about.

Since that particular cake has been the most often baked in a foil pan item, I have seen that it consistently bakes slower in foil. It just doesn't have the thermal mass of a heavier metal pan, I guess. The occassional lasagna or casserole is always slower, but that also comes from being cold or frozen. I thought about placing the foil pan inside a metal pan but haven't done that. I have placed them on my baking stone or a baking sheet. I think that does help.

The other was baking a 16 layer cake for a 16th birthday and deciding that foil pans would make that faster than having to clean and prep the same 2 pans over and over and/or having to split layers. I'e only done that once and they baked quickly since they were thin.

It just doesn't have the thermal ass of a heavier metal pan

Oh, lascatx, your typo (autocorrect, I'm sure) made me laugh Sprite all over my computer - seriously!

Oh shoot. I actually saw that one and thought I'd corrected it. Hope the computer is okay. LOL

Colleenoz, it's possible, but this is the third time in a few days, with the others more specific and direct.

A great tip I got from from Linda--pick up proper baking pans at yard sales or thrift shops for less than disposable costs and stash them for these occasions. Bake in real pans and send them on their way with a sticky saying they're not to be returned!

The reason for baking brownies below 350° F is to prevent browning. The
M(don't want to look up spelling) reaction starts at 350°. For
brownies, 325° is pretty much standard.

Bbstx, besides the variability of ovens, there's the variability of clocks! And there's also the copy over effect. What if the original said "50-55" minutes but was one of those weird ways of making numbers and was copied wrong? What if Granny was going from memory and forgot that 30 minutes was just to check that it wasn't browning too fast, but it got changed to 20 minutes, and the total number got lopped off? Or she just forgot the numbers altogether and figured if it wasn't done at 30 min., it would for sure be under and you'd figure it out? What if she had a highly conductive pan that made brownies that much faster? What if it really is 35 minutes without checking it at 20? What if her ingredients were different enough that they baked that much differently? (I know that can be an issue in general. We'd need Grainlady to tell us what and why.)

In college, I learned about how the notations of professional scribes who weren't allowed to scrape off mistakes were interpreted by future generations who didn't understand the system to change the meaning, and how even the very best scribes could accidentally substitute homophones, which on occasion could invert the meaning of a sentence from positive to negative, or some other drastic alteration. Don't cling so tightly to text. My favorite bread book, Local Breads by Daniel Leader, is so full of errata that they keep a web page of corrections up, and people on Fresh Loaf and similar sites add more. Don't cling to the text! You know how to bake. You know what done is. Trust the evidence not the words.

Maillard. I looked it up for spelling, and found that I remembered how to spell it correctly. I've accomplished that if nothing else today.

I'm going to make notations that if I cook in a foil pan, it will take about an hour. Then I'm going to try again but in a metal pan and see how long that takes.

Buying pans at yard sales and sending them on is a good idea, except I try to keep my kitchen fairly spare. That doesn't mean that I don't have 2 sets of measuring cups and 3 set of measuring spoons, but I don't know that I want to have extra pans floating about.

Not to go OT, but I once saw a stack of pyrex pie plates at a thrift store marked at 50-cents to $1, so I grabbed several of them to have as 'give-away' vessels... then I realized they make terrific saucers for my large potted plants! :O)

Don't put the extra pans in the kitchen! Put a plastic tub in the garage or somewhere similar out of the way. Just pick 'em up as you see 'em. And do it often enough that you remember they're there when it's time to send more brownies or casseroles or whatever.

And good for you for looking it up. I get lost in the i's and l's. :)

I was searching for blondie and brownie recipes and each one I saw gave 350 or even 375 for baking temps. Most were for 9X13 pans and gave approx 30 minutes for cook time, some even as much as 40 minutes.