Cookie Dough Cupcakes

I am not a professional baker but I can make cake from scratch and I watch Cake Boss and Cupcake Wars so I think I can say with some authority:

Faith is a genius.

For her birthday she wanted a chocolate cake with a twist - instead of frosting between the layers, she wanted cookie dough.  That sounded good, but I was concerned that the cookie dough wouldn’t spread well and that it might be a little too heavy so we talked about it and came up with … (drum roll please) … Cookie Dough Cupcakes.

I used the recipe on the back of the Ghiradelli Unsweetened Cocoa powder for the chocolate cake and frosting.  I like the Hershey’s cocoa powder recipe too, but Faith wanted more of a dark chocolate flavor which Ghiradelli delivers.

We baked the cupcakes in paper liners and while they baked, I made the faux cookie dough from the Cookie Dough Brownie recipe topping.  Essentially, it has most of the ingredients of real cookie dough except for the eggs so you can eat it raw without risking salmonella poisoning.

Salmonella poisoning is a bummer.

Important tip:  Use the mini chocolate chips for the cookie dough.  The regular sized ones are just too chunky for a cup cake.

After the cupcakes had cooled, I wasn’t sure what to do next.  I thought we’d have to cut out pieces of the center, but it worked better to just press holes into them with the handle of a wooden spoon (a finger would work too).

When they all had holes in them, we filled them with the cookie dough.

Faith wanted orange frosting so we made one batch of vanilla buttercream frosting that we could color, and one batch of the chocolate Ghiradelli frosting.  Of course, it’s easy enough to just spread the icing on with a knife, but Faith watches all those cake shows too, and she wanted to pipe it on.

Since they were her cupcakes, I let her at it.

She did a good job, didn’t she?

But of course, appearance is secondary to taste.  Really though?  How can you go wrong with chocolate cake, cookie dough and frosting?

You can’t.

They were amazing.