Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream

For Desert tonight, I had Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream. I had to make it last night, as it needs some time to freeze. It is essentially cookie dough without the eggs with ice cream mixed it (we used vanilla ice cream instead of yogurt). The cookie dough, with all its butter and sugar is of course delicious, but overall this dessert is quite decadent and in any quantity a little overwhelming. If I could only figure out how to mix the dough into vanilla ice cream as little nuggets, instead of mixing the two together into one concoction, we would be hitting a grand slam!

http://tastykitchen.com/blog/2012/08/chocolate-chunk-cookie-dough-frozen-yogurt/

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Kim had apparently signed me up, without informing me or asking me, to make her 36 chocolate chip cookies. Which is a lot, since there is approximately a 10% tax on all cookie dough going through my Kitchen Aid mixer, but I sure enough managed to do it. To top it off, I decided to make Mike and Bruce an extra large cookie! I was honestly a little nervous about making the larger cookies, but by flattening them down, they managed to come out nice and evenly without requiring a modification to the cooking time or anything. I also decided to make cookies for our favorite Boba employees! I think that they were extremely appreciative of the cookies, which is nice, especially since I don't have to eat all the cookies myself, which is a very rough task to have to endure.

Two special-order cookies, extra large!

For recipe, I just used the recipe that came with the Kitchen Aid mixer. They come out extremely legendary, and are pretty simple to make. I am not a huge chocolate fan, so i typically go light on the chocolate chips.

-Mike

Kim: I DID tell Mike that I had signed him up to make cookies.  I gave him over a month's notice!  I told him that I promised that we would make cookies as soon as I found out that we would be making food for the homeless shelter.  I just forgot which date in May we were supposed to be going to make food.  As a result, I REMINDED Mike a few days before the cookies needed to be made.

Oatmeal Fudge Bars

Mike made this dessert using a recipe from the Comfort Food Makeovers book.

Pumpkin Muffins

The other item that we decided to go ahead and give a whirl was the pumpkin muffins. The predominant driver in this, is that we still had some pumpkin left over from the pumpkin pie that I had made a few days ago. Unfortunately, when I received the Executive Order to make the pumpkin muffins, Kim didn't realize that we only had 1/3 of a cup of pumpkin left (the recipe called for 1 cup). So, I had the pleasure of cutting all of the ingredient quantities in 1/3. Not too bad on most things, but kind of sucks cutting 1/4 cup into 3 (1/12 of a cup), especially when you have a white 1/4 measuring cup, and you are trying to measure milk and when the milk is 1/3 the way up the measuring cup. But all prevailed and worked out. We did not use the Vitamix for this recipe, but rather just used my KitchenAid mixer. It turned out producing 7 cupcakes, or what I am coining as a "baker's half-dozen".

Recipe:
https://www.vitamix.com/Find-Recipes/P/U/Pumpkin-Muffins

Chocolate Chip Calzone

One of my all-time favorite desserts is the Chocolate Chip Calzone from Claim Jumper. This decadent treat tastes like a chocolately marshmallow pizza, but it is in fact composed of simply pizza dough, regular chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, and powdered sugar.

Ingredients:

• Pizza Dough
• 3-ounces White Chocolate Chips
• 3-ounces Semi-sweet Regular Chocolate Chips
• Spoonful of Powdered Sugar

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 450 Degrees.
2. Roll out pizza dough into a 12 inch circle.
3. Mix the white and regular chocolate chips evenly over half of the dough.
4. Fold the dough in half to make a crescent moon shape. Pinch the dough shut tightly and press a fork along the edge.
5. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes. Allow to cool for a few minutes and then sprinkle the powdered sugar on top of the calzone.

Pictures of the completed Calzone.

The rolled out ball of dough.

Chocolate chips placed onto half of the Calzone.

The calzone folded over, pinched shut, and a forked edge (for style and fun).