I've never tried a recipe that calls for incorporating MELTED butter with sugar (white or brown). It's always been softened butter. But then I'm not a very adventurous cook.

It sounds like the water and fat are separating. Like a sauce breaking. It's really hard to get back together, especially after mixing with other stuff. If you have a high speed blender small enough for the quantity, it should be able to pull it back together. Some butter nowadays isn't even all butter, but has stuff like “spreadable ”oil in it to reduce the price aand ruin the baking. Make sure your butter has at least 82% milk fat in it. Or use ”European” style butter, which has less water, though make sure it won't matter to the recipe.

In melting, don't rush. Low and gentle will help. Double boiler, or lowest power burner on lowest setting, in cast iron, glass or ceramic—an insulating rather than high conduction. If I just need a couple tablespoons melted, and no browning, I zap for 20 seconds in a Pyrex custard cup then let it finish melting in its own heat. If there's still a little blob holding together in a pool of melt, just use it, rather than trying to get it perfect and having it split.

Good luck!

When i make the ATK chocolate chip cookies with browned butter, it has me hold back some of the butter and whisk it into the browned butter This lowers the temp and seems to help when incorporating the next ingredients Does ATK take questions?

So the recipe is a video?

Are you saying you removed some of the butter before you added flour, or after? Because I'm thinking the flour would have absorbed the separated butterfat and then it could be mixed thoroughly into the batter.

How'd they turn out?

Thanks, everyone! I don't know if ATK takes questions.

Plllog, thanks for the specifics! LoneJack, the recipe calls for browned butter, which means the butter is melted to get the browned parts, and so I'm not using softened butter.

Yes, the recipe is the video since I don't have an "account" with ATK. In the video, amounts and steps are clearly given so that's how I did it. I removed some of the melted butter that would not incorporate, *before* I added the flour. It just looked too greasy to me, and not at all like shown in the video. These turned out tasty with notes of caramel, great slightly dense "body" and yum yum yum!

IMPE, blondies are usually extra oily/buttery. I haven't made any in years - they're basically sugar/fat bombs, but oh-so-delicious!

I was going to ask if your butter was natural or messed with?

Islay, all butter, from them there cows out in the field :0)

Just want to add that a large amount of liquid fat can certainly be beaten/whisked into eggs until emulsified - that's what mayonnaise is, after all. Maybe the butter was too hot? I usually beat cold eggs into melted butter.