After I made the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream a few weeks ago I decided it would be great if I could have some kind of cookie to go along with it. Chocolate was the obvious choice since it would pair well with the vanilla base of the ice cream. I looked around a bit and found this recipe for Chocolate Brownie Cookies over at Joy the Baker that seemed perfect. I love soft cookies, and cookies with the texture of a brownie seemed awesome. Well, the cookies didn’t come out as planned, but they were perfectly tasty anyway.

First the eggs and sugar are whisked together to form a smooth mixture.

To this, the melted butter and chocolate are added. This is probably where my problem lay. The recipe calls for bittersweet chocolate, but I had none. In more than one location I found the instructions to substitute 1 ounce of unsweetened plus 1 tablespoon of sugar for 1 ounce of semisweet or bittersweet chocolate. I went ahead with this, but a few sites also vaguely mentioned that the ounce-to-ounce ratio would not be equal, or that you might have to adjust the fats as well. I can see how adding an entire half cup of sugar (what I had to add in the end) might change the consistency of the finished cookie.

Once all the ingredients have been added and thoroughly mixed together, the batter-like dough is refrigerated to make it easier to handle when scooping out onto baking sheets.

The recipe calls for them to be dished out by the tablespoonful. I don’t have one of those handy disher scoops, so I used a rounded two teaspoon scoop. I still managed to get plenty of dough on my hands, though.

They baked for 11 minutes, the time given in the recipe, and did not seem to have changed from their original state. I eventually left them in for about 18 minutes. They never really spread out, but they lost their glossy sheen and they cooked all the way through. They turned into tiny little brownie bites with a dark chocolate flavor, which makes a good pairing with the sweet vanilla ice cream. Sometimes things don’t turn out like expected, but they can still be delicious!

Brownie Cookie Bites (adapted from King Arthur Flour)

Ingredients

• 8 ounces unsweetened chocolate (chopped)
• 3 Tablespoons (1 1/2 ounces) butter
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoons salt

Directions

1. In a double boiler, or in the microwave, gently melt together the chocolate and butter. Stir till all the chocolate melts.
2. In a large, separate bowl, beat together the sugar and eggs till they’re thoroughly combined. Add the hot melted chocolate.
3. Stir in the remaining ingredients and mix well to combine. Refrigerate the batter like dough for at least 1 hour, to make it easier to handle.
4. Preheat the oven to 325ºF. Lightly grease (or line with parchment) two baking sheets, three if you have them.
5. Drop the cookie dough by the tablespoonfuls (about the size of a small ping pong ball) onto the prepared baking sheets. You can place them pretty close together, because they won’t really spread.
6. Bake the cookies for 18 to 20 minutes, until their tops have lost their shine and a pin stuck in comes out clean. Wait 5 minutes then transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool.

I had never made homemade ice cream before, but seeing a bunch of delicious looking ice cream recipes around, and knowing that I would be around all summer without air conditioning, inspired me to pick up an ice cream maker. I decided to get this popular machine from Cuisinart, and was lucky enough to find a never opened, new-in-box one on Craigslist for half the retail price. As far as deciding what my inaugural ice cream would be, it was almost an obvious choice when I considered the small amount of cookie dough in my freezer left over from the cookie cake pie. By making a good vanilla custard base (this Essential Vanilla Ice Cream from Serious Eats) and mixing in pieces of the cookie dough, I would have a perfect chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

Good vanilla ice cream is based on real vanilla beans, not extract. I happened to have a bundle of vanilla beans in the freezer that I brought home from Madagascar and I hadn’t done much with except make vanilla sugar. I thawed one out and it worked perfectly. You can just see the black, glinting beads inside the split open pod in this picture… all of those have to be scraped out, and they’re what makes black dots in good vanilla ice cream.

Here they’re all scraped out into the cream and sugar mixture, which is being heated. The pod goes in too because it has a lot of flavor as well.

Ice cream takes a lot of egg yolks, which is in part why this is so yellow. The custard—basically cream, sugar and egg whites—is cooked down until “the custard coats the spoon”, which is supposedly what you’re seeing here. A finger swiped across the back of the spoon should leave a clear trail, although I found that this was true fairly early on before the custard had thickened much. You can also use a candy thermometer and wait until it hits 170–175ºF, which I did as confirmation because I like that scientific accuracy.

Once the custard has cooked to the right stage, it is poured through a strainer (to remove any lumps) into a container in an ice water bath. Most recipes recommend that you refrigerate your custard overnight at this point to make sure it is cold before adding it to your ice cream maker for optimal freezing. After a night in the fridge my custard was pretty thick, like pudding, and into the ice cream maker it went.

With five minutes remaining on the freezing cycle of your ice cream maker it’s time to add any mix-ins, in my case cookie dough. Here is about a cup and a half chopped into small pieces, which were a little big still for my ice cream maker, but it got over it and mixed them in. Note: this is not an egg-less cookie dough recipe, which means it is not 100% safe for eating raw. I like to live on the wild side, however, and I had not been made sick previously by this batch, so I used it anyway.

After the freezing cycle of the ice cream maker it’s best for the ice cream to go into a container and into a freezer for curing. Be sure not to pack it in too tight, you don’t want to push out all the air that the ice cream maker worked to put in.

This recipe was great, and I would definitely use it again if I needed a basic vanilla ice cream recipe. The cookie dough worked perfectly, just like chocolate cookie dough ice cream you would buy, only better.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (adapted from Serious Eats)

Ingredients

• 1 vanilla bean
• 1 cup half-and-half
• 2 cups whipping cream
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 6 egg yolks
• 1 1/2 cups chocolate chip cookie dough, chopped into small pieces

Directions

1. Split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape the fine black seeds into a non-corroding saucepan. Add the vanilla bean pod, half-and-half, cream, and sugar, and warm the mixture over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has dissolved.
2. Whisk the egg yolks just enough to mix them and whisk in some of the hot cream mixture. Return to the pan and cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until the custard coats the spoon, or a thermometer reads 170–175ºF.
3. Strain into a storage container through a medium-fine strainer to remove any lumps that may have formed, scraping as much of the vanilla bean through the strainer as you can. Recover the vanilla bean pod from the strainer and put them in the container to flavor the ice cream mixture while it chills. Cover the container tightly and chill the custard thoroughly (preferably over night). When you are ready to freeze the mixture, remove the vanilla bean pod. Freeze according to the directions for your ice cream maker.
4. In the last 5–10 minutes of the freezing cycle, add in chopped up cookie dough a little at a time, and let your ice cream maker mix until incorporated.
5. Store your ice cream in non-reactive containers—plastic or glass—tightly covered. Place in the freezer to allow to “set” overnight, or as long as you can wait to eat some.

I won’t say much about this, because the cookie cake pie pretty much speaks for itself. Upon learning of this sugar bomb, dreamed up by Cakespy, I was instructed it would have to be the next thing I baked.

I decided go with a pre-made frozen pie crust, the standard Nestlé chocolate cookie dough, and a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting topping all of it. Can I eat a large slice of it? No way. Is it delicious? Definitely.

First the cookie dough. I thought of going with a different, more nuanced recipe, such as Alton Brown’s The Chewy, but in the end decided that it wouldn’t really make much of a difference. If you’re not baking the dough in normal cookies, what does it matter if it’s supposed to be “chewy”? I’m not going to reprint the Nestlé recipe, because it’s on the back of every bag of Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate chips you buy. You can find online here.

The butter and sugars are creamed, and the eggs added one by one.

After the eggs and flour mixture have been incorporated, it’s time for the chocolate chips. Yum, cookie dough.

Now, somehow I spaced out and didn’t get a picture of the cookie dough in the pie crust. Probably because I had to do it twice; I originally had a regular sized frozen pie crust, and half the cookie dough recipe patted into a inch thick layer basically filled up the entire crust. I had to go back and get a deep dish pie crust, which was the correct size.

With a little more than half of the cookie dough recipe patted into the pie crust, it was time for the cake. I got my red velvet cake recipe, which is pretty traditional, from Pinch My Salt, and I halved it for this purpose (and still got 4 extra cupcakes out of it).

One of the first steps is to combine the food coloring and the cocoa powder to form a paste. I only had gel food coloring, which didn’t initially work too well until I added about a tablespoon of water, after which it came together like magic. I actually added a little more water after this to make the paste thinner.

The butter and sugar get beaten together as above, and the eggs and vanilla added.

In goes the food coloring/cocoa powder paste to make the mixture nice and red. This recipe calls for a lot of food coloring, but it’s worth it for the deep red color it makes the cake.

The flour and buttermilk are folded in alternately, and the recipe includes an unusual step where you mix baking soda and vinegar, add it to the almost complete batter, then stick it in the oven quickly. Here the batter fills in the rest of the pie crust, leaving space for expansion during baking.

After baking it looks more like a cake pie. But the hidden layer lies in wait.

First it must be frosted… I used a similar cream cheese icing recipe to that I used on the leftover black bottom cupcakes.

Not the best frosting job in the world, but it’s passable.

You can see the layer of red velvet cake (which is quite moist and tasty… I look forward to trying it by itself) lying overtop the cookie layer, all encased in a pie crust. Who said dessert perfection was unattainable?

Red Velvet Cookie Cake Pie (adapted from Cakespy)

Ingredients

• 1 batch of cookie dough
• 1/2 batch of red velvet cake batter
• 1 deep dish frozen pie crust
• 1/2 recipe cream cheese frosting

Directions

1. Remove frozen pie crust from freezer and set aside.
2. Prepare 1 batch of chocolate chip cookie dough. Spread just over half of it inside the pie crust so that it forms a layer about an inch thick that evenly coats the bottom of the crust.
3. Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
4. Prepare a half batch of red velvet cake batter and spread it evenly over the cookie dough, leaving room in the pie crust for the cake to rise.
5. Bake for 35-45 minutes, or until a pin inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean of red velvet cake batter.
6. Frost with cream cheese icing, and serve.