The Cookie Dough Fiasco

The Set-Up:

On New Year's Day, Mike and I invited Mike's older sister and her family over for dinner. Mike had read something in an email about about good, yet easy ideas to try. One of them was to use a muffin tin to make chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream bowls. Doesn't that sound good?

The Outcome:

Well, we tried it, and I'm here to tell you that it is not a good idea and it is not an easy idea.

The Execution:

We tried putting cookie dough around the outside of the muffin tin and baking it upside down. I thought I had put it on thin enough so that when the dough rose, it wouldn't be unmanageable. Ha. No. Not what happened.

The Mishap:

As you can see, a lot of the dough sunk down to the bottom of the tin, then overflowered like a cookie dough waterfall to the bottom of the oven.

It was a veritable explosion of dough, none of which made a useable cookie dough ice cream bowl.

The Second Shot (aka, The Mulligan):

Undaunted, I persevered and tried lining the inside of the muffin tin with the dough. Again, I tried to be judicious with the dough...just enough so that the sides were thinly covered.

The whole thing just rose and coalesced together. It ended up looking like skin cancer would if tumors were made of chocolate chip cookies.

The Final Product:
I got a mini muffin tin and put a teaspoonful of cookie dough on the top, baked it, and let the dough run down the sides. It made cute (sort of) little mini bowls that held one bite of ice cream. It was enough to please Mike, who ate all three bowls that worked (kind of) out.

The "Ah-Ha!":

I finally looked online to see if anyone had tips for making cookie dough ice cream bowls. In what turned out to be an "oh duh" moment more than an "ah-ha" moment, I found out you actually have to use an "oven-safe-bowl-within-a-bowl" method. And you have to use a modified recipe so that the cookie ends up being a little big crunchier...which in my mind defeats the purpose of making chocolate chip cookies. Who wants a crunchy chocolate chip cookie? I'd much rather have an ooey chewy gooey one.

The Take-Home Lesson:

So, use my example of something NOT to do. Stick with regular ice cream cone bowls and regular chocolate chip cookies. If you want to combine ice cream with the chocolate chip cookie, may I recommend putting it in the form of an ice cream sandwich with the ooey chewy gooey chocolate chip cookies on the ends? Less messy, tastes better.