Life’s all about balance, isn’t it? Balance between fun and obligation, between work and play, between family and friends and bills and chores and everything else we juggle each day. Balance has never come easily to me – some people are natural jugglers and others of us (hi!) are just more adept at tossing around one ball at a time. I tend to immediately lose my grip on something else whenever I pick up something new, but I try not to let that stop me from making new tweaks to the Jenga tower of life, because really, you can’t just do one thing at a time and call it living.
I don’t make nearly enough cookies – I tend to get distracted by fussier desserts like tartlets and cupcakes. I forget that the humble chocolate chip cookie can easily measure up against its fancier cousins, and sometimes even surpass them.
Okay, I’m lying. That’s not the real reason I don’t make cookies. The real reason is that I stink at cookies. Rather than acknowledge that and work to get better, I would prefer to just bury my weakness in the cookie arena in a dark corner of my mind and come up with a flip excuse when someone asks me to make them – “wouldn’t you rather have cupcakes?” “Oh, how about cookie dough ice cream instead?” The fact that even I can’t seem to screw these up speaks to how fail-safe these cookies are.
This is just the cookie recipe from the back of the Quaker Oats box, tweaked slightly and with extra ingredients. It’s endlessly adaptable – I call these “kitchen sink cookies” because you really can throw anything but the kitchen sink in them and they’ll still turn out perfect. This time I used chocolate chips and pecans because that’s what I had on hand, but walnuts, raisins, white chocolate chips, and toasted coconut (my mom’s brilliant addition) are all good additions, too.
Make these today. Have them before dinner (or for dinner). They’ll make you forget that you didn’t win the Mega Millions jackpot last night. Unless you won the Mega Millions jackpot, in which case I’m not sure what you’re doing reading this instead of immediately hiring me to make your cookies for you.
Before I say anything about these cupcakes, before I tell you how to make them, before I go on and on about just how delicious they are (and oh, they are delicious), I’m going to hand out one piece of preemptive advice: these are best eaten on a treadmill.
I’m not one to wax poetic about the joys of butter. Yes, I use it. It is what it is. But I don’t buy it in bulk (well, unless there’s a really good sale) and I do make a cursory effort to exercise relative moderation.
That said, we’re talking dessert here. Some desserts are so incredibly, ridiculously over-the-top good, that they’re worth the occasional splurge. This is one of those desserts. It’s every beater you snuck from the mixing bowl and ran into the next room to lick clean when your mom wasn’t looking. It’s every spoonful of raw cookie dough that won the mental battle between potential salmonella and guaranteed bliss. It’s every chocolate chip cookie you grabbed from the cookie sheet and bit into when it was still almost too hot to eat. Simply put, it’s nostalgia, decadence, indulgence, and eye-rolling flavor, all rolled into one cupcake that’s worth whatever extra calories it throws your way. Just this once. Or twice.
This cupcake holds a special place in my heart – I come from a family of cookie dough fiends, and I can’t even count the occasions when a cold brick of slice-and-bake chocolate chip cookie dough has made its way onto the table as dessert over the years. We would all grab spoons and crowd around the dough log until nothing was left but the sticky wrapper and the tacit acknowledgment that no one would ever know what we’d done (um…sorry, guys). Having this cupcake in the repertoire both brings back those fond memories and ensures that our shameful dough binging will never happen again. With a rich brown-sugar chocolate chip cupcake filled with a dollop of eggless cookie dough (buh-bye, salmonella fears, even though I always ignored you), topped with a slightly grainy cookie dough buttercream and a miniature chocolate chip cookie, I think we can officially put our days of sneaking raw cookie dough to bed.
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