Cookie Dough Dip (it's good for you!)

I pinned this recipe a long time ago, but it leapt to mind again when I was having a friend over who'd just recently started a diet. (Unfortunately, her diet precluded this, so I had to eat it myself. Darn.)

It's like a bowl of cookie dough—only instead of being full of butter, sugar and raw eggs, this uses yummy alternatives that happen to be better for you. (Okay, except for the chocolate chips. Those are still the same, if you want them to be.)

Photo by Chocolate-Covered Katie

Chocolate-Covered Katie, creator of the recipe, freely admits she has no sweet tooth. Meanwhile, I'm the opposite. So I can tell you: go for the full 1/4 cup sweetener. (I used agave nectar since I had it on hand [because I bought it to use on my hair. I'm weird, huh.]) I also found that both chilling it and storing it seemed to make the chickpea/hummus flavor more pronounced, so every time I pulled it out (yes, somehow our family made this last three days), I added a little more peanut butter and agave nectar to counteract that.

As per Katie's request, I'm not reposting the recipe here—just telling you that if you pinned this and haven't tried it yet (okay, even if you haven't pinned it!), give it a try!

One suggestion: do not mention that there are chickpeas/garbanzos in this when you serve it. Do like Katie did and let people try it on their own before they know it's healthy.

Cookie dough cupcakes

Quick note:  as of last Thursday, I'm an official guest blogger for Latter-day Woman Magazine! Come join me on a PieQuest—this week will be Hershey's S'mores Pie, so be sure to subscribe to my free updates, or the whole magazine blog!

I definitely didn't see anything in my son's Wednesday Folder about a bake sale to accompany his school's carnival (*cue my mom and sisters swooning that our baby could be SO BIG*). But I couldn't miss the purple slip of paper advising us that they hadn't gotten a lot of donations, and we could bring them to the carnival if need be.

When you're wayward and crafty, you'd better plan on bringing them to the carnival. Late.

Anyway, I just finished a book called Always the Baker, Never the Bride, and the eponymous baker heroine had won awards with her Crème Brûlée Wedding Cake. So my first thought was Crème Brûlée Cupcakes. Though I found (and pinned!) some really awesome recipes, I realized we didn't have nearly enough time, since the carnival was starting in . . . about three hours. Awesome.

On one of the websites with a crème brûlée cupcake recipe, though, was another tempting treat: Cookie Dough Cupcakes (from How to Eat a Cupcake).

The recipe for the cupcakes themselves came from the Cake Mix Doctor, but How to Eat a Cupcake's link to the CMD's site didn't work, and a search of her site didn't show the recipe, either.

But I wasn't giving up that easily. In a past life, I was an Internet marketing professional, so I pulled out my toolbox and found an online archival copy of the recipe (it takes a few minutes to load).

The recipe is also found on pages 124-125 of Cupcakes: From the Cake Mix Doctor. (The book also happens to have a recipe for making mini crème brûlées in cupcake tins on pages 294-295.)

The basics: they're yellow cake mix a little dressed up, but I don't know that all the dressing was necessary—the extra oil made the cake a bit greasy.

Then you need frozen cookie dough. The Cake Mix/Cupcake Doctor says:

If you use the 18-ounce logs of refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough (instead of the 1-pound packages of frozen dough), cut them into 24 equal pieces and freeze them before using them in this recipe. It's important to use frozen dough, because you don't want it to bake completely and become a cookie. You want the center to be gooey when you bite into it.

 We went to/called four local grocery stores and not one carried frozen cookie dough. And, as I mentioned, we were on a time crunch, so I'd initially rejected the idea of a refrigerator cookie dough, but I had no other choice. My mother-in-law was visiting, and we opened the 1 lb. package and put the 24 cookie dough cubes into plastic baggies and stuffed them in the coldest places in the freezer.

After about 40 minutes, they were pretty firm, so I mixed up the cake. Then my mother-in-law and I poured them into the cupcake liners. Now, here is the tricky and hard part: getting a gooey nugget of raw cookie dough (come on, you know you love it) in the middle of a cooked cake. See if you can pick up on our technique:

Yeah. Just stick 'em on top.

The batter swallows them up in the oven.

Unfortunately, sometimes they cave in pretty badly:

But if you get them browned, they're a bit more stable (ignore the cheap, ugly muffin tins):

I happened to have some canned vanilla frosting on hand, and I added about 2 Tbsp of cocoa, which actually tasted pretty good. We also had come Cookie Crisp, so that became our decoration.

Now, of course, I totally spaced on taking a picture of the most important part: the cookie dough in the middle! Here's the idea (notice the void left by the cookie dough—be careful when taking the cupcakes out of the pan!) but our cookie dough spread out a bit more and didn't quite get all the way to the bottom:

Flickr photo by Kristin Ausk of Meringue Bake Shop

I think they'd be better chilled than room temp, and I'd reduce the oil in the recipe. (In fact, I'd probably just make a regular cake mix and follow their directions.)

The worst part: we didn't label our cupcake tray for the bake sale, so nobody knew what they were getting when they bought these. I wonder if they liked the surprise (or knew what it was!) . . .

What do you think? What's the most unusual cupcake you've ever had or made?