Shimmy Shimmy Coconut

Several months ago, in a post punk kitchen thread barely acknowledged, an idea was suggested about putting frozen cookie dough balls into cupcake batter and as the cupcake bakes, the cookie dough thaws creating a soft cookie dough filled cupcake. It was an intriguing enough idea and so I made these:

White choc macadamia cookie dough centred chocolate cupcakes with white chocolate ganachey icing. They were, ofcourse, quite a hit with the work colleagues.

I recently received the third season of US version of The Office from a friend of mine and returned the favour by making a new batch of these cupcakes. I have no white choc chips anymore, so instead I made some baci flavoured cookies (based loosely on the Veganomicon choc chip cookie recipe). I rolled small amounts of cookie dough into 40 balls and froze them on a tray*. Once they were pretty cold I put them in a ziplock bag and stored them in the freezer. The cupcake recipe I used was the hazelnut cupcakes from VCTOTW. I aliquoted half of the cupcake batter into the prepared cupcake tray, but realised it wouldn’t be enough to cover the cookie dough balls** so simply distributed the batter evenly then pushed the cookie balls into the batter so that the balls were sticking out. They baked away for 20mins. Once they were cool I simply made a quick chocolate icing with melted chocolate, margarine, icing sugar and a dash of frangellico. It was a little runny but thickened up when I added some soy milk powder.

The result:

Sprinkled with hazelnut meal, they are reminiscent of ferrero rocher cupcakes. Another winning cookie dough cupcake.

* Frozen cookie dough balls are also a pretty great after dinner treat on its own!

**Next time, I reckon 1 and a half batched of this cupcake would be a better amount if you want a cookie dough center.