1 1/2 teaspoons coarse sea salt for sprinkling on top when they are done
Preheat oven to 350. Butter or spray a 8-inch square baking pan with nonstick.
Put the two sticks of butter in a sauce pan and melt. Once melted, crank up the heat to medium high. Stand by, stirring and watching. This isn't the time to go and put your dry ingredients together. When you start to see it leaving the golden butter color and turning brown...it's very close to being done. You'll start to see this color change happen around the edges. Once it moves to the rest of the pan, take it off the heat and pour in a bowl to cool a bit.
Add the espresso to the browned butter and blend together.
Whisk together the sugar, vanilla and eggs. Then whisk in the brown butter mixture. This will take a lot of elbow grease to incorporate. You could use your stand mixer, but I didn't. My dishwasher broke (don't even get me started) and the new one doesn't get here until next week. It just sounded like more dishes. Yuck.
Pour the flour mixture into the brown butter mixture. Use as few strokes as possible to just combine. Add the chocolate chips and mix until mixed through. Make sure there aren't any pockets of flour...this is thick batter and they could hide in there.
Pour the batter into your prepared pan. Smooth it out so that it's even. Drizzle the caramel sauce over the top, using your spatula or a spoon to make sure it's evenly drizzled about. Try to make pretty if you're feeling it.
Bake for about 45 minutes, but check at 35. It should start to get a bit of a tan and a hair darker around the edges with only a tiny jiggle in the center. Cook until the major jiggle wiggle is gone. However, these will be ooey gooey. Sprinkle with the 1 1/2 teaspoons of coarse salt as soon as they're out of the oven.
Cool completely in the pan (seriously). Invert onto a cutting board. You can cut them using cookie cutters (like Martha) with the smooth side up. Or, flip the blondies over and cut them into squares. I was thinking that it would be cute to use a springform pan and have them come out like pie slices. Next time.
It should be mandatory that this is served with vanilla ice cream. But I didn't have any. Sigh.