Recipe: The Cookie Monster

Hello, dahlings

So yesterday I mentioned that while I was in Wales, me and the boy did some experimental baking. Namely, we tried to recreate the 'Cookie Dough Lava Cake' from Bella Italia, which he fell in love with when we went for a meal there a few months ago. The description Bella Italia give for this dessert is 'moist chocolate chip cookie cake with a melting chocolate middle, served warm with vanilla pod ice cream and caramel sauce' - easy enough to copy, right? All you need to do, we reasoned, is create a giant cookie and stuff it full of chocolate. 

 

This is the result. Look at that bad boy glisten! He may not be as aesthetically pleasing as his chain-restaurant cousin, but he's warm, gooey, and delicious. And if my last copy-cat recipe left you feeling far too fresh, healthy and light, then he will fill you up with goopy delicious bad-for-you-ness. Just what you want on a chilly winter's eve so close to the Yuletide festivities.

To make this mean chocolatey machine, you don't need to get too many ingredients - most of the stuff for the dough is in your standard baking cupboard. For the base we used the Millie's Cookie recipe from BBC Food, which I used a couple of weeks ago at uni to make standard cookies and enjoyed. For this you have to beef up the quantities a little though, so you will require:

For the cookie:                                               For the filling:

150g butter, softened                                        2 bars cooking chocolate

125g light brown soft sugar                               Fudge chunks (optional)

160g caster sugar

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 tsp vanilla extract

280g self-raising flour

½ tsp salt

200g chocolate chips

If, by the way, you do have all of those 'basic' ingredients and only need to get the chocolate stuff, then you will do what we did, and end up having to go to the till at the supermarket with an armful of this:

Which, you know, doesn't make you look like a pair of pigs at all. 

To make The Cookie MONSTER, preheat your oven to 180°C, gas mark 4, or whatever your equivalent is. Then, cream the sugar and the butter together, add the egg and vanilla, and sift in the flour and the chocolate chips. 

Check your dough. Is it delicious? It should be. If not, start again. Once you've got it to maximum deliciousness, get out a cake tin and grease it. Then create a sort of shell of cookie dough inside it using about 2/3 to 3/4 of the dough, like thus:

Make sure to create at least a cm of depth along the bottom, and line the edges too so you can really trap the filling. You do not want that stuff escaping! Once your cookie prison is created, put it aside and melt up your cooking chocolate. If you're using the fudge chunks, throw them in as the chocolate is beginning to meld together. 

Once melted, do a Nigella and pour the chocolate slowly and lovingly over the cookie so that the velvety smoothness caresses the sides.

Spread it around the base to fill it. This is the only thing I'd maybe change about this recipe: the dough and chocolate start to meld together a little bit at this point. If I was going to do it again, I'd maybe be tempted to either bake the dough on it's own for 5-10 minutes or let it set in the fridge for a while... just something to get it to firm up a bit more. But then, I didn't do that this time and it worked out just fine, so here's what I did next: I covered up the chocolate with the remaining cookie dough. It was quite tricky, because the chocolate was still warm and the two mixed up a bit.

Finally, bung it in the oven for 12-14 minutes, then leave to cool for another 10 or so and serve with whatever you like - we picked ice cream.

And there you have it! Messy, goopy, sugary goodness. Fit enough for even this fella:

Image.

Have you done any experimental or copy-cat cooking?

Stay golden. Kiss kiss XX