Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Stuffed Cupcakes

I came across cookie dough cupcakes a few months ago but was finally motivated to make them after the recent gift of a cupcake corer. I had previously seen some recipes online that had a vanilla cupcake stuffed with the cookie dough and with a cookie dough frosting but being a chocoholic, I decided to switch it up and use a Devil's food cupcake instead.

And again, being that I was sharing these with my vegan friends I made these vegan by using a Devil's Food Duncan Hine's mix for the cupcake and margarine instead of butter and soy milk instead of milk. And of course, gotta love the Trader Joe's chocolate chips!

All the steps are easy but it is a long process putting it all together so give yourself time!

Here we go....

Devil's Food Cupcakes

Buy a box of your favorite brand of Devil's food mix (or make your own if you have the extra time) and follow the directions.

Let the cupcakes cool before coring. I used my new Williams-Sonoma corer.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

See our previous blog on the best eggless cookie dough around (I used half the recipe for the cookie dough center but feel free to make the whole batch so you can nibble away while baking!)

Make sure the dough has been chilled for a least an hour in the freezer before making teaspoon-sized cylinders for the dough centers.

Place the cylinders in the cupcake core and make sure the top of the cupcake is even.

Cookie Dough Frosting


Ingredients:

1 c. unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 c. vegetable shortening
3/4 c. brown sugar
3 c. confectioners sugar
1 c. all purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
3 Tbsp. milk
2 1/2 tsp. vanilla

Mix all the ingredients (except the chocolate chips) in a mixer or with a hand blender until smooth. Put frosting into a piping bag with your favorite tip. Pipe the frosting onto the cupcake and sprinkle with chocolate chips.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

1 c. flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. butter
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
1 package of chocolate chips

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt. In a separate bowl, combine the butter, sugar and egg. Add the flour mix to the sugar mix and add the vanilla. Stir to combine. Add chocolate chips and mix evenly.

Place tablespoons of dough on a cookie sheet and bake for 12-15 minutes. Let the cookies cool and place in the middle of the icing.

You can keep the cookie dough center a secret and give your guests an extra surprise when they bite in!

Good luck eating just one!

Thing 1 & Thing 2 Baby Shower

My best friend, Christina, (who happens to be Aric’s cousin) and I love nothing more than to throw a party together. New Year’s parties, Christmas parties, you name it. It seems like we are always looking for a reason to get creative and plan a themed event.

Lately it has been a lot of baby showers. At the end of 2011, there will be 11 babies born amongst our circle of friends just in this year alone! So it has been a great adventure to come up with new ideas or try out concepts we have cultivated from various websites and magazines. My go-to for party ideas has always been http://www.marthastewart.com/ but Christina has introduced me to the delightful world of www.pintrest.com, which is also a wealth of wonderful creations. I have since become almost as obsessed as Christina about this website, as my iPhone now houses the Pintrest application and quite often I can be found scrolling through it for ideas.

I digress though… Our latest party together was a baby shower (of course) for twins! Christina immediately came up with the idea of Dr. Suess’s Thing 1 and Thing 2 and we ran with it. I ran across an image of the most adorable cupcakes for this theme and knew I had to make them.

These are fairly easy to make. Either use your favorite cake recipe or your favorite box of cake mix (I used Martha Stewart’s Red Velvet cake recipe as I was trying to stick with the red, white, and teal blue theme). Then white icing – again, whatever icing you prefer works but I stuck with the cream cheese frosting that Martha uses with her Red Velvet cake. The blue hair is where it gets tricky! I don’t have a cotton candy machine and wasn’t looking to invest in one so I went on a search to find some pre-made. Well, that turned out to be wild goose chase but Christina eventually managed to buy some off of the concession stand at the local baseball stadium. Just be warned that as soon as the cotton candy is out of the bag and on the cupcake, you have about half an hour before these start to melt, eventually ending up with a glue goo on top of the cupcake!! But for the first half hour, they are darling.

To highlight our other treats at the party, we got Thing 1 and Thing 2 cookies made by Laura’s Cookies, a local favorite here in Dayton, OH. We also created a colored theme candy bar, seen at the top of this post. A friend made vegan coconut cupcakes.

We had the rest of the food catered to save ourselves time on the day of the event, as it was planned for right after work.

We even got them to make Shirley Temples for the expecting mom, as she has been craving them lately.

I had also been waiting for a reason to make pom-poms that have been featured oh so often online in party and wedding pictures recently. I followed Martha’s advice and turned up with some wonderful and inexpensive party decorations!

All in all, the party was a hit and we are excited to plan our next celebration!

Dawn