When I first started working in student affairs, I liked to bake chocolate chip cookies for students on their birthdays. I felt a special tie to this particular cookie because it was invented by a woman who graduated from the same University that I did. Along the way, and mostly by accident, I had perfected my recipe by insisting on only using real butter, a specific baking pan, and a timing technique that made them perfect. It was easy to make a batch, bake up a dozen, and freeze the rest of the dough for another time.
This whole cupcake baking happened by accident. I baked some one day because I felt like it, and realized I couldn’t go off and eat a whole 12 cupcakes. So, I brought them to work in hopes that people in the office would eat them. I posted them on Facebook in hopes that my newest team of students would be lured into my office even if it was just to get one and leave. And they came. And the cupcakes went. I was excited to try new flavors and test them out. I liked seeing a bag of candy for a perfect topper and more and more I wanted to make really fabulous looking and tasting cupcakes.
Last week, I found a recipe for cookie dough frosting on Pinterest that was actually eggless cookie dough and another pin about adding cookie dough to the center of cupcakes. With two cookie dough themes in one week I knew it was finally time to combine my first baking specialty with my new baking obsession!
After reading the cookie dough inside the cupcake post, I realized I’d need to find a vanilla cupcake recipe that worked with the ingredients I had on hand. I’m not going to share it here and you’ll find out why shortly. If you need a cookie dough recipe, look no further than the back of the bag of Tollhouse chocolate chips. Oh, and use real butter.
While making the cookie dough for cookies and frosting seems like a lot of work, I just mixed the butter and dry ingredients together, then split the mixture in half and added egg to one and heavy cream to the other. Freezing the cookie dough before you bake it in the cupcakes will ensure it stays in shape while baked. I loved how mine created little cracks through the cupcake tops!
Oh, the cookie dough frosting. How disturbingly delicious (and safe to eat). I used the recipe from Cupcake Project as my basis, but found that my dough wasn’t coming together without more liquid and I kept going back to the directions to see if I missed a step. Finally, I decided to apply typical frosting making methods and add some heavy cream. It’s what I would do to thin a recipe of butter cream frosting and it was perfect. I probably used 1/3 cup of cream total in my frosting, but I didn’t measure. I just added a little at a time until it was piping consistency.
The Results…
Welp, the reason I don’t want to share the vanilla cupcake recipe is because it was terrible. It made dense, unflavored cupcakes. This seemed to work in my favor in two ways though. First, it was so dense that the cookie dough didn’t drop to the bottom making it look great after the first bite. Second, not carrying much flavor allowed for the cookie dough ball and frosting flavors to really shine.
As the baker, I tend to be more critical than my eating audience. Only one person (my best critic) also noticed the poor quality of the cake itself. Everyone else loved it and many people came back for another. That is my universal sign that it was good to others taste buds. Maybe the best compliment was the student who asked if I could make the cupcakes again for Family Weekend on Saturday. Saturday is not Monday and I don’t duplicate my cupcakes, so thanks for the compliment, but no. Lol.
Cupcake/Monday 
Let's talk cupcakes!