Of Cookies and Cupcakes

On Monday evening I held a board-game night, for people both from college and from my department. It was a great evening, with lots of fun boardgames played (Pandemic! Ticket to Ride! Cards Against Humanity! Taboo! Settlers of Catan! Dominion! Etc!), lots of fun people, and lots of fun food and drinks. My friend Kaila was here for the weekend, (as previously seen in the "Funtimes with Kaila and Benson" post), so she was extremely helpful in aiding my food prep for the evening. She made a delicious spinach dip, for example, as well as helping with numerous other dishes including finding a GREAT recipe for basil pesto bread in my bread machine cookbook. But the most awesome dish that the two of us made was a previously untested (by us) recipe that Kaila found online that looked really cool: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes - the original recipe can be found here.

This is exactly what it sounds like: cupcakes, stuffed with cookie dough. They're pretty straightforward, too - just drop frozen chunks of cookie dough on top of your cupcake batter and bake. But of course, you need to make the dough and the batter! So as a bonus, this post also includes a recipe for delicious Vanilla Pudding Cookies (with chocolate chips!) - a different recipe for chocolate chip cookies that was the standard at our place in college. Unlike my other chocolate chip cookie recipe (see "Christmas Cookie Spectacular" blog post), this recipe is designed to put out large, fluffy, SOFT cookies which stay soft for a long time after you've baked them, as in, probably a week though they've never really lasted that long! And although you only need a half a recipe for the cupcakes, well, we made a full batch so that we could have cookies in addition to cupcakes! So two delicious desserts for one! Apparently you can also just use the standard pre-made cookie dough that comes in tubes to make this recipe even easier, just roll THAT in balls and freeze it instead of making homemade cookie dough. You can also substitute other cookie doughs or other cake mixes to mix and match.

Vanilla Pudding Cookies (makes 4 dozen)

2.5 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1 3.4 oz package vanilla pudding mix
1 c. softened butter
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups chocolate chips
(1 cup walnuts)

Preheat the oven to 350F (assuming you are making cookies). First mix all your dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, the sugars, the pudding mix) in a large bowl, thoroughly. Next, mix in your softened butter. Repeating something I said in my "Christmas Cookie Spectacular" blog post, be sure to actually soften your butter, rather than microwaving it until it's melty. Melted butter and softened butter are very different animals, and the quality of your cookie somewhat depends on your butter consistency! While we did soften our butter as we were supposed to, if you are in a rush, there is an easy trick to make it soft really quickly, without cheating with the microwave - if you have a cheese grater, you can grate your hardened butter through it, which increases the surface area of the butter and lets it soften up right away. Plus, since it's already grated, it mixes easier than straight up hard butter does, even when each individual piece might be harder than truly softened butter. So a handy trick if you are ever in a pinch, like you've suddenly developed a massive cookie craving in the middle of the night and you MUST BAKE NOW. Yes, this has happened to me.

Once you've added and mixed the butter, proceed to add the eggs and vanilla as well, and mix thoroughly. Now, at this stage, your dough may look a little dry and/or flaky. If this is the case, you need to mix it more thoroughly, until it's completely homogenous. The easiest way to do this is just get in there with your hands and mix it thoroughly! So everything should look nice and smooth, as a cookie dough should. Once you've done that, add the chocolate chips as well. And if you like nuts in your cookies, I suppose you can also add those, though I wouldn't recommend them for the cupcakes, and personally I don't like nuts in my chocolate chip cookies! So, if you are making cookies OR cupcakes, you'll want to put the dough into 1 tbs balls and place them on a cookie tin (or, in the case of the cupcakes, into something that will fit into your freezer but keep the balls separated). If making COOKIES: bake for 10-12 minutes in your preheated oven, until they're nice and brown on the bottom.  Remove from the oven, let cool, and consume. These will stay soft for at LEAST a week, probably longer!

If making CUPCAKES: place the balls (24 of them, one for each muffin, though I added an extra one for luck) into the freezer for at least 2 hours, until they're frozen solid. The reviews of this cupcake recipe are very vehement that the cookie dough MUST be frozen solid for these cookies to turn out right. So freeze them well. Heck, overnight, if you so desire, I guess. When they're frozen, you are ready to make your Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes



Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes
1 box of cake mix
Any additional ingredients required to make said cake mix (this usually consists of some number of eggs, some oil or butter and water)
24 frozen solid 1 tbs balls of chocolate chip cookie dough - REALLY frozen.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Mix your cake mix according to the instructions on the box. In our case, this involved a red velvet cake mix, 3 eggs, 1 1/4 cup of water, and substituting a half a cup of softened butter for the half a cup of oil (because that way your cupcakes are more buttery! Can't go wrong with that!). Next, either line your cupcake tins with cupcake holders or grease the cupcake pan. We didn't have the paper cupcake things, so we just greased it, but next time I'd definitely use the liners: especially since if these are underdone they're otherwise quite difficult to remove from the pan. Fill your cupcake pan so that each cupcake thing is 2/3 full. I would emphasize that you are adding both cookie AND cupcake batter to your tins, so don't overfill: the cupcakes rise significantly. We overfilled ours, and they overflowed a little. Still tasty, but not as pretty! Next, place a frozen dough ball on top of each of the cupcakes, centered. It will sink as the cupcake bakes, so you don't need to press down or anything.

 In the comments from AllRecipes, it emphasizes to REALLY make sure the dough is frozen and DO NOT over cook the cupcakes, or they'll cook, and you'll have chocolate chip cookie stuffed cupcakes instead of chocolate chip cookie DOUGH cupcakes. Not a tragedy if you overshoot a little, but just be aware. Bake for 16-18 minutes - test the cupcakes by sticking a toothpick into it near the side of the cupcake - since you are testing the doneness of the cupcake part, not the cookie dough part. Once you think its done, remove the cupcakes from the oven, and let cool for 15 minutes (so it settles) before removing from the tins. Then you can pop them out, and they're ready for frosting!

Chocolate [Almond] Frosting
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup butter, softened
2 1-oz squares of unsweetened chocolate (melted)
1 tsp vanilla
Optional: small splash of almond extract
2.5 cups powered sugar

Bring the butter and the milk to a boil in a small saucepan, then blend in the chocolate, vanilla and, if you so desire, the almond extract. We actually didn't intend to add almond extract, but the bottle of vanilla and the bottle of almond extract look very similar, and some went in before we realized our mistake. But it was a very tasty mistake indeed, so if I made this again, I would replicate it! Next, slowly add your powdered sugar, blending as you go until it's smooth. You should probably taste as you go, and add more or less as you desire your sweetness level. While the original frosting recipe we were following (from my wonderful all chocolate-based recipe cookbook!) called for 2.5 cups of sifted powdered sugar, we cut it down a bit to 1 3/4 - mostly because that was all the powdered sugar we had. However, we found that it was actually just about the right amount of sweetness, so it wasn't a huge problem. The icing WAS a little runny, however, and tended to get a bit melty when in a warm room, so I'd probably go with the full amount of sugar if you have it. Once that's all done, you can frost your cooled cupcakes! And you have a delicious treat for you.

Our final products were very tasty, but NOT the prettiest cupcakes I've ever made. Our first batch turned out slightly overdone - so it was an absolutely scrumptious cupcake with a soft and fluffy chocolate chip cookie baked inside - which was delicious, but wasn't chocolate chip cookie dough we were going for. For our second batch (I only have 12 cupcakes worth of cupcake pans, so we had to do it in 2 batches), we overcompensated and undercooked - so we got the cookie dough part, but the cupcakes were almost falling apart because they weren't quite cooked enough. I'd error on this side, personally, if you have cupcake liners, since the main problem here was difficulty of removal from the pan. Note that the cooking time difference between the two batches was 2 minutes (18 minutes for the first, 16 for the second). So there is a fine, fine line here. And it probably varies based on the exact cookie dough and cake mix you use - so experiment a little! But all in all, very tasty, I would definitely make these again.

Baked cupcakes before the icing stage