Magic Gluten Free Blondies

Magic gluten free blondies are rich brown sugar bars with the extra chewy texture of corn flake cereal added to the batter. My favorite chips here are butterscotch, but the choice is yours.

Magic gluten free blondies aren’t actual magic. I don’t want to mislead you. You might know them as magic bars, or you might not know them at all.

They’re really just blonde brownies with flaky cereal baked in. The cereal acts almost like oats do in baking, since they hold their shape and create a chewy texture.

Other than the cornflakes, brown sugar is the star ingredient in this recipe. Since there’s so much brown sugar, it caramelizes beautifully and almost invisibly in the oven.

The baked edges of the bars taste almost like they’re kissed with caramel. Listen, if you don’t like sugar, or have to avoid it, this is not the recipe for you.

Cereal in these blondies makes them magical 💫

When I was a kid, we had “dream bars.” To this day, I can’t figure out if that’s a real thing, or if it was just a peculiarity of my childhood.

But everyone loved them, with their chewy texture and sweet brown sugar taste. Only many years later did I figure out that they were essentially blondies with Post brand Grape Nuts Flakes cereal in the batter.

But Grape Nuts flakes, if they still exist, are most certainly not gluten free. But we don’t need them.

The cereal flakes in this gluten free blondies batter layer together, surrounded by that delightful mixture of brown sugar and vanilla. If you look closely at the recipe, you’ll see that it has more brown sugar than it even does flour. That isn’t an accident.

Selecting the right cereal

There are a number of available gluten free cereals that come in flake form, but most of the flakes are strangely very thick. Nature’s Path gluten free corn flakes are relatively thin—although not as thin as Kellogg’s.

There aren’t many available brands of gluten free corn flake cereal. I used Nature’s Path brand “Honey’d Corn Flake Cereal,” which is gluten free.

You can probably even use Corn Chex cereal, too, but they’re more likely to splinter when you crush them. You want to crush larger flakes into smaller ones, not Chex into dust.

Ingredients and substitutions

Dairy

There is dairy in this recipe in the forms of butter and the chips. In place of butter, you should be able to use vegan butter. My favorite brands are Miyoko’s Kitchen and Melt.

Butterscotch chips and white chocolate chips have dairy in them. I’ve never been able to find a version of either type of chips that’s dairy-free and tastes good.

Instead, I’d recommend using dairy-free chocolate chips. My favorite brand is Enjoy Life.

Eggs

There are 3 eggs in this recipe. I’m afraid I don’t recommend making this recipe with any sort of egg replacement.

If you’re determined to try using an egg replacer, you’d do best with a legitimate “flax egg.” I’m referring to cooking flax seeds with water until a viscous liquid is created, from which the seeds are strained and discarded.

Corn flakes

See discussion above about the cereal in the batter.