I’ll Bake If I Want To

It’s my birthday today, and due to a variety of reasons, it’s just me and the kid. I’m heading up to hang out with my favorite awesome ladies of the Vagina Monologues tonight, so it’s not sad and pathetic and mopey, but someone needs to make me cake, and that someone is clearly going to be ME.

Ordinarily, if I were in Georgia, I would have gotten a cookie cake from Great American Cookie, because they are awesome and amazing and my favorite.

However, I am not in Georgia. I am nowhere in the South, and compared to the THIRTY FOUR Great American Cookie places in Georgia, there is a whooping TWO in Colorado. Both of which are almost an hour away. We have experimented with other cookie cakes from other places, but they’re just not nearly as good.

So, because I am BRILLIANT, I decided to look online to see if anyone had a copycat recipe I could try.

I found two!

One of which advised me to take the regular toll house cookie recipe but sub this and add that and don’t forget to do these other arcane rituals to make it come out perfect.

The other said to take a thing of refrigerated Pillsbury cookie dough and add a fourth of a cup of corn syrup.

Guess which one I chose?

So! Let me walk you through this, for no other reason that I need to document whether I can reproduce anything resembling the best cookie cake in the world.

I used:

-An extremely old bottle of Karo* syrup that I don’t remember ever buying
-A regular size thing of refrigerated Pillsbury chocolate chip cookie dough**
-A flimsy disposable pizza pan for ease of travel

Step one:

Blend

Step two:

Smoosh into greased pizza pan with wet hands

Step three:
Shove into oven at 325 for 25 minutes. The recipe said to line the rack below it with foil in case the cookie tried to crawl over the edge and escape, but I didn’t.

*This is the one word more than anything else that makes me sound Southern. It is pronounced KAY-ro, and my husband laughs every time i say it.
**I’m not sure why Pillsbury, but I didn’t want to offend the recipe gods.

And then, because it’s my birthday, and I figure at 35, I might should practice being a motherfucking adult, I actually stopped licking the cookie dough out of the Pillsbury thing to WASH THE MIXING BOWL. And by wash, of course I mean I actually remembered to put soap in before running water and leaving it in the sink.

Step four:

Hmmm. That doesn’t look…quite right. Mildly (I hope) overcooked except for that bump in the middle, with bonus over-overcooking on the edges where the cookie tried to crawl over the edges and escape.

Nonetheless, we shall proceed. Onward! To the decorating!

I didn’t even try to recreate the Great American Cookie frosting, although it is yummy, because I am lazy and frosting comes in a can.

I let Voldemort pick it out, which was probably a mistake. And then, to compound the mistake, because I have no problems making my own cake, but I feel really weird about writing “Happy Birthday, Alia!” on my own cake, I let Voldemort decorate.

I have been informed that it says “Happy”, “Mom,” and that is a happy face at the bottom. I know the 0 in “Mom” originally started out as a 6, because he wanted to write “65” on the cake for how old I was. At which point I gently informed him that I was, in fact, 35, and shouldn’t he go do something somewhere else before he accidentally wrote 105?

Taste test still to follow. Will let you know tomorrow if I will be going into competition with Great American Cookie.