Delicious Evil, Edible Brains - Part 2

These Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes have been my son’s favorite since my first failed attempt at making them (we’ll talk about that later). 

Picture for Brain Cupcakes from Epicurious.com

He asked to me make them for last year’s craft party, so to make them fit the Halloween theme, I used the frosting to create brains.  I didn’t take pictures, but if I did and if I had any sort of mastery over a pastry bag, this is what they would’ve looked like. 

 

The frosting was a buttercream with brown sugar, so with a drop of blue and red food coloring, the frosting did have a grey appearance.  I won’t do that again, grey is not appetizing and the realism isn’t worth having to convince people that they are really ok to eat. 

Back to the recipe, I made one change to the ingredients.  The cookie dough is a little bland, so I increased the salt from ¼ teaspoon to ½ a teaspoon.  I’ve never added salt to a recipe before, but in this case I think it’s warranted.

The first time I made these I overfilled the muffin cups and still had a lot of leftover cookie dough, and batter.  Of course they collapsed from being too full and looked awful, but everyone liked them enough for me to keep trying. So here’s what I learned:

1.5 tablespoon is the perfect size for the cookie dough balls. This recipe yields about 48.

The recipe works much better if you make 36 cupcakes instead of 24 and buying a third muffin tin makes life so much easier.

Drop a heaping spoonful (3 tablespoons if you're measuring with a scoop) of batter in the wells of all three tins.

Place 24 of the frozen dough balls in the center of the batter, to fill two of the tins. 
The batter is very thick, press the dough balls down just a little, so they don't roll off to the side while baking.
Bake the two muffin tins for 20 minutes.  My oven cooks a little hot and 20 minutes is perfect.
After those are done, place 12 more frozen dough balls in the third tin and bake that one for 18 minutes.

The original frosting recipe makes enough to generously frost all 3 dozen cupcakes. 

 

 

Now if after all of this, you’re still not getting your RDA of refined sugars, have I got a fix for you.  I recently made these cupcakes again for my son’s birthday and I had an evil genius idea.  I discovered while making truffles this Creepmas that 1.5 tablespoons is the optimal filling size for my brain molds. How big are those leftover cookie dough balls?  Exactly!

I let the dough balls thaw slightly.  Then I divided one ounce of  white chocolate between the three brain molds and let it chill.  Once the chocolate was set, I pressed a dough ball into the mold and used another ounce of white chocolate to coat the top of the mold. 

My husband called them evil, that’s just how good they are.  Then next day was like living in a zombie movie, with the whole family walking around, “Brains, brains…are there any more brains?”

I used all white chocolate because that’s what the majority around here like, but I thought it made them way too sweet. If I were making these for me, I would’ve used just a half ounce of white chocolate  to coat the molds and give the brains a light color, but then I would’ve used dark chocolate for everything else.