What could possibly be yummier than a cookie? A deep dish cookie!

This idea came from a guest post on Handle the Heat by Danielle from Live Well Bake Often. She introduced them as “cookie cups” because you can press down the centers after they come out of the oven and then fill them with frosting. And while Danielle chose chocolate and Nutella for her flavors, I decided to go with a classic – chocolate chip.

The recipe I finally settled on is from allrecipes.com and claims to be the “Best Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Considering it has 7,798 (!) reviews and nearly a perfect 5 star rating, I was excited to try it (with a few changes):

The Ingredients

• 1 cup butter, softened *
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 2 tsp. hot water
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Notes:

• I used margarine (Imperial), and it worked fine.
• The original recipe called for walnuts, but I omitted them entirely. I really just wanted the chocolate chip goodness!
• Dairy-free recipe – yay! 🙂

The Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350° F
• Grease muffin and/or mini muffin pan *
• Cream together butter, white sugar, and brown sugar until smooth using a stand mixer *
• One at a time, add the eggs and beat until combined
• Stir in vanilla
• Dissolve baking soda in hot water. Add this to the batter along with salt.
• Add the flour. Slowly (!) mix until all flour is incorporated
• Stir in chocolate chips *
• Bake for 18-20 minutes – until edges are slightly brown and centers aren’t raw *

Notes:

• I used both a muffin pan and a mini muffin pan! There was the perfect amount of batter.
• You can probably do this with any mixing tool, but I prefer my stand mixer. Makes it so easy!
• I like to stir in my chocolate chips by hand so the mixer doesn’t crush them and to give the batter a good final once over.
• The original recipe said to bake for about 10 minutes, but at that time, my cookie cake centers were still pretty raw.

Ta-da! Cookie cakes of two sizes! The mini ones baked up in about 18 minutes, and the standard ones took closer to 20 minutes. But they all came out wonderfully! I really liked the crisp exterior they got from baking in the muffin pans – almost like a thin, delicate crust. And the centers were nice and soft. The recipe really did live up to its name!

Nick and I also found that, like in Danielle’s original recipe, a bit of frosting goes great with these. We didn’t make any from scratch this time but rather used a Pillsbury vanilla one – complete with colorful sprinkles! 🙂