Do you want to make friends? Are you looking for a husband? This cookie cake is the answer.

The search for a good Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake recipe came into my life when I owed my neighbor a favor. She, knowing I love to cook, requested: “Make me a homemade chocolate chip cookie cake for my daughter’s 16th birthday, it’s her favorite!” 

( …No pressure, right?! )

So, I did some reading about grains and ingredients, perusing recipes online and taking notes. I then made a test cake for my family and some friends. I even climbed into the dusty attic of my memory to find the perfect frosting to go with it… something smooth and fluffy, like a mousse nearly, and not too sweet so as to compliment the rich, dense cookie cake… ermine!

The test was administered. The critics approved. Even I was surprised at how good it was. It was like success was out looking for me all along, and we bumped right into each other. 

When the fateful day came, I made the 16th Birthday Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake decorated with ermine frosting and flowers and delivered it next door with all the nervous energy of a first grader’s first day of school. It went over like a fairy tale. The complements were lavish and plenty. The success was weighty. The expectations were forever cemented.

The only problem was, I lost the recipe. 

So, armed with the reckless confidence of an initial success, I embarked on a sad journey of dry, salty cookie cakes, soggy greasy despondency and humbling mediocracy.

Pride comes before a fall, friends.

But alas, after sojourning the cookie cake realm, I believe I have recovered it.

What makes it so good?

What is it that we want in a cookie cake? For me it’s both texture and flavor. I crave a dense, chewy, rich hunk of buttery, brown cookie and I want notes of salt, bitter chocolate and the perfect amount of sweetness.

No. 1: (you guessed it) Freshly Milled Whole Wheat Flour

Yes, I am a believer in the milled whole grain. 

No, not the sad bag of dank, processed flour, stripped and reconstituted with by-product, labeled “whole wheat” and plopped onto the grocery store shelf. That’s not what I’m referring to.

By “freshly milled whole grains” I’m referring to wheat berries, which are the little kernel of wheat, ground as needed in a counter-top mill, and therefore retaining all their inherent goodness, texture and flavor in a state of perfect preservation until needed. Soft white wheat and khorasan wheat (also called kamut) are the hearty, wholesome base of this cookie cake.

(P.S. If you’re using regular all-purpose flour, your cookie cake will still turn out wonderfully, just add a few extra tablespoons than we would have used if it were FMWW.) 

Freshly milled grains require extra moisture compared to conventional all-purpose flour. You cannot be too careful about putting only as much flour as is necessary or you run the risk of dry results.  

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but, you need to measure. With a measuring cup. Not your hand. Not your eyeball. Not your conscience or your optimism or your grandmother’s intuition. With a cup. 

This is probably one of the only times I’ll ever tell you to measure your ingredients carefully. When it comes to breads you can always add more water as you go, but in a cookie, it’s all about the ratio; you can’t simply add 1/17 more butter and egg to make it all better. 

It is an arduous task and it stifles my creativity and I resent the chore. But for the sake of avoiding a dry cookie cake, measure the flour. And then go use your hair to do a mud painting or whatever makes you feel *free*. Just measure the flour. 

No. 2: Quality Butter 

Meaning butter with a high fat content that was derived from a grass-fed, pastured cow. 

The truth is, butter is good, and good butter should cost money, because it’s valuable. Butter is one of nature’s most lavish and extravagant forms of calories and nutrition; it’s meant to be obtusely decadent.

The amount of butter needed to make this cookie cake and it’s icing is a full day’s work for a cow. The amount of forage she needed to find, select, eat, chew, ferment, re-chew, and digest to make the volume of milk that would contain this amount of butter is substantial. Not to mention the energy it takes from the sun and earth to produce that forage, from the farmer to husband the land and the cow, the processes needed to get that milk from the cow in a clean and timely manner, to have it separated and churned into butter, wrapped neatly and delivered to your grocery store. And don’t forget the time and energy it took YOU to make the money that paid for it and to get it into your kitchen. 

Let’s not cut the legs off the whole thing with cheap butter. Cheap butter likely comes from cows who are fed lower quality diets and live lower quality lives. The butterfat content is reduced along with the nutrition, leaving you with a pale, hard stick of “butter” in name, but lacking the inherent goodness God meant it to have.

But I’m not saying so because of my high-horsed cow-morality or butterfat superiority complex, (that’s an added bonus), I’m saying it because it makes better cookie cake. 

If you can’t have butter, I would suggest a coconut oil as a substitute. It may take some experimentation to get it just right, but my instinct says use slightly less oil than the recipe calls for butter. Tallow or lard might also work. 

In any case, please, don’t use margarine or vegetable shortening. It’s an assault to your health. 

No. 3 Molasses & Sugar

So it turns out that brown sugar is just sugar with the molasses put back in it that had been taken out of it before it was put back into it. It’s like pulling the color out of a flower and then painting back on top of it.

I don’t know about you, but I was kind of let down by that information. 

On the bright side, you don’t have to buy brown sugar anymore. Just buy a versatile sugar and keep a jar of molasses on hand and add it to anything you’d like to have that deep, dark, rustic, brown sugar flavor… like cookie cake! Now you’re in control. Want it darker? Go ahead, pour forth. I find it liberating. 

As a side note, if you’re familiar with Azure Standard, they have a cane sugar that has abnormally large sized crystals. It’s almost like a turbinado sugar. It makes for the best texture in cookies and cookie cakes! I use regular “sugar in the raw” for most of my baking, but when making cookies or a streusel topping (or wanting a crunchy little something extra on top), turbinado sugar or Azure Standard’s sugar is where it’s at! 

“But sugar is unhealthy, why don’t you use honey instead?”

Because, Pamela, I like sugar. 

No, really, I understand. And I agree. 

Honey is amazing, it’s one of my most favorite things, right up there with butter. But I don’t use it in baking because I find that cane sugar really brings the texture to the table. Also, honey is sweeter than sugar, so for example, in order to substitute and retain the appropriate sweetness, you’d need to use half a cup of honey in place of one cup of sugar. And in the chemistry of baking, these sorts of shenanigans can land you in weird places. (Although in a sauce or ice cream or something along those lines, I would likely go for honey.)

No. 4 The Egg & The Other Egg’s Yolk

Unlike chocolate chip cookies which are notorious for using two eggs, the chocolate chip cookie cake calls for an egg, and the additional yoke of another egg. It feels a little like mystic lore or mad science, separating the second one and extracting only the yellow bulb from it to add to the concoction, but somewhere deep down, it feels right. 

Egg whites are made of different stuff than egg yolks. With proper treatment, egg whites turn into a chick and the yolk becomes the sustenance inside the stomach of the chick, able to survive it for some time until it begins to eat for itself. 

So when you eat an egg white, you’re essentially eating a potential chick, which in its egg stage is protein and water. And when you eat an egg yolk, you’re eating a potential chick’s first lunch, which is full of fat and vitamins and nutrition. 

How that makes you feel about eggs is your problem, but for our discussion today, an egg plus another egg’s lunch is what makes for a good cookie cake. 

No. 5: The Art of Pans and Times

I have an assortment of dishes, and over time I’ve come to realize how they each perform differently in the baking process. 

I find cast irons, Dutch ovens, earthen ware (stone/clay) and thick ceramic dishes are all trustworthy vessels . 

I am suspicious of glass dishes for some unknown reason, and I am generally avoidant of thin metal dishes like cake pans or cookie sheets (unless I’m making something that cooks in just a few minutes). 

The size of pan also determines the depth of your cookie cake, which will directly affect the time it will take to cook through.  

With all of this in mind, I prefer a thick and heavy dish that will give me an even heat distribution that is 8″-10″ in diameter, combined with a lower cook temp (325 degrees) for a longer time, 45-60 minutes. 

Really, you just have to keep an eye on it and trust the old fork test. Remember, it will become firmer as it cools. 

What About the Icing From the Attic?

“Ermine frosting”

This stuff is amazing. 

I certainly did not invent this recipe and I can’t remember now where or why I came across it, it was some years back. Ermine frosting an old-fashioned confection, dating back to the 1800’s and possibly earlier, made with a sweetened milk and flour pudding blended into a whipped butter… I know that doesn’t sound appealing and I almost didn’t mention that part because it’s hard to imagine how such a thing could be so delicious, but stick with me…

 (And apparently an ermine is a little white weasel… I don’t know, I’m confused too.) 

I am one of those duplicitous individuals who both craves a sweet treat and simultaneously doesn’t want it to be sweet. I guess I just really enjoy being able to eat whole mouthfuls of something, to really sink my teeth in it, and I just can’t do that with an overly sweet dessert. 

If you can relate, you’ll love this frosting. It’s almost neutrally sweet, like a whipped cream, a rich, vanilla-mousse-whipped-cream. It’s billowy and downy and delightful. 

Happy baking, and may the occasion for the celebration be even richer & sweeter!