Out of curiosity, I was browsing free templates available for new Blogger layout today. I'd vaguely planned to convert from templates to layouts anyway to use the new functionality available, but hadn't seen any layouts that "spoke" to me.
That was until I ran across this template, it's exactly what I had been looking for: minimalist, clean and customisable. I did some housekeeping (removed irrelevant elements, rearranged some others and added an RSS feed subscription one) to update the content too somewhat.
I hope you like this new layout as much as I do.