Strawberry Rhubarb Blondies

Easy Strawberry Rhubarb Blondies make use of all those fresh strawberries and rhubarb! The easy cookie bars are sweet, buttery and tangy. Perfect for summer picnics.

We love strawberry crisp and can’t get enough of our buttery rhubarb crumb cake, but how often do you often bake with strawberry and rhubarb together? We don’t do it enough.

And that’s changing with these strawberry rhubarb blondies.

How do I use rhubarb?

Do you have an abundance of rhubarb from your garden? It can be tricky to know what to do with it all.

Rhubarb pairs beautifully with strawberries. Jams, cobblers and breads are popular when working with strawberries and rhubarb.

In the past when we’ve had strawberry and rhubarb, we’ve made strawberry rhubarb pie (or this giant poptart-like slab pie). But we wanted to switch things up a bit. We’re famous for our cookies, so why not some cookie bars…AKA strawberry rhubarb blondies?

Why are blondies called blondies?

Blondies are very similar to brownies in shape and texture. However blondies are not “brown” because they don’t have chocolate in them. Blondies get their flavor from brown sugar and butter, which gives them a buttery rich molasses flavor.

Blondies are considered “blond”, giving them their name! They are very similar to other cookie bars, so that is another name that you’ll often hear them called.

How to Make Strawberry Rhubarb Blondies

Here are a few tips when making blondies:

• Use melted butter. This not only helps with texture, but also makes mixing the batter very easy. No power mixer necessary.
• Use brown sugar. Packed brown sugar to be exact. And if you really want to add deep molasses flavor, use dark brown sugar instead of light brown.
• We used unsalted butter for this recipe. If you use salted butter, reduce the salt you add to ¾ teaspoon at most.
• All of our recipes call for large eggs. If a recipe doesn’t specify what size eggs to use, you can assume it is large. **Pro Tip: If eggs are at room temperature, they mix in much better than cold eggs.**
• Dice the strawberries and the rhubarb finely so that they bake in well. You can remove the strings from the rhubarb if you’d like but you don’t have to.
• Press the batter into a 9×13 baking pan. Make sure you spray the baking pan with cooking spray. If you’d like the bars to come out perfectly clean and easily cut them into nice squares, line the pan with parchment paper before adding the dough. 
• Bake the blondies for about 27-30 minutes. You want the edges to be ever so slightly browned, but if you want the bars to be soft, don’t over bake them.

Can I use frozen strawberries in place of fresh strawberries?

Yes! If you choose this, I recommend buying frozen whole strawberries. Thaw the strawberries and strain off any extra liquid. Then dice the strawberries as if they were fresh.

Can you freeze blondies?

In general you can freeze blondies. Because these blondies have fresh fruit on top, they will be trickier to freeze. When you defrost them, the fruit can become mushy. For that reason, we do not recommend freezing blondies with fresh fruit.