Blondies are bar cookies that are intended to have the same dense, somewhat fudgy texture of brownies, but without having a chocolate base and believe it or not, this is actually a Chocolate Chip Blondie, not a brownie. The reason that it looks so chocolaty is that mini chocolate chips were stirred into the batter in place of larger chocolate chips and, during baking, they melted right in. I doubt anyone complained before digging in, though.

This batch of blondies was baked by Vegan Core and it is completely vegan. She used a recipe from the Post Punk Kitchen for the basic blondies, then added a topping of cashews and chocolate ganache to make them a little bit more visually interesting and to add some crunch.

Taking a business idea straight from the comics, Dean Young, who draws the comic strip Blondie, is going to open a small restaurant called "Dagwood's Sandwich Shoppe" in Clearwater, Florida, this August. Unsurprisingly, they will specialize in sandwiches.Young plans to make the shop into a chain with at least 100 locations, 25 of which are already spoken for.

 A Dagwood sandwich is defined in Webster's New World College Dictionary as "a thick sandwich with a variety of fillings, often of apparently incompatible foods," and it was created back in the strip in the 1930s, when Dagwood piled a sandwich with every leftover in the fridge. Not only did he love it, but readers did, too, and it's been a comic staple for years.

Instead of the haphazard and huge sandwiches with everything but the kitchen sink, Dagwood's will serve a more realistic menu that includes Cuban sandwiches, New Orleans-style roast beef sandwiches, corned beef and pastrami, in addition to soups and salads. There will be an actual Dagwood, of course, featuring a pound-and-a-half of meat and fillings stacked up several inches. Somehow, I expecty that they'll leave out the spaghetti, whole fish and lobster that the comic Dagwood enjoys. But I could be wrong.

[Image via hotelwakiki.net]