So I saw a post on how to make mini ice cream cones from sugar cookies. It wasn’t what I wanted at the time but it left an impression in my brain of something that I could do.
You start with your basic mini-muffin pan. It’s got 24 cups and your store-bought, pre-portioned cookie doughs make 24 cookies. Are you with me so far?
So you put two and two together and get a one to one correspondence. (Does that always work?)
In this case, I filled the cups with Pillsbury Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies. Actually, I cheated. I had a coupon for Pillsbury giant cookies which makes only 12. So I cut the pre-portions in half to make 24 portions. My previous cookie-cups I just used sugar cookies. As the cookies start baking, they melt into the cups and fill them completely.
Then as they bake through, the moisture is baked out and they collapse in the center to form a cup.
In order to make the cups uniform, while they were warm and gooey from the oven, I pressed my marble pestle lightly in the center of each cookie.
The purpose of cookie-cups is to fill them up. For the sugar cookie-cups, I filled them with almond paste. For these oatmeal-raisin cookie-cups, I was going to fill them with a date-walnut filling.
I don’t know if they actually make a date-walnut filling but making my own was easy. I just chopped the dates into the walnuts, about a half cup of each, and when I thought they were sufficiently fine, I added a full tablespoon of buckwheat honey to bind them.
One of the trickier parts of this endeavor is getting the cookie out of the cup. I solved the problem simply by sticking a plastic toothpick down the side of the cup. It pops it right out.
Filling the cup involved two spoons and a bit of patience as the honey-date-walnut mix wanted to stick to the spoon equally as to the cookie-cup. Once you have the cups filled,
you’d think that it would be enough sweets for anyone, but no! There’s more. If you have one of these
you go back and add icing on top to seal in the goodness. I went with the Pillsbury Cream Cheese Frosting for these. It only uses about half a tub to do all 24. On my sugar cookie-cups with almond paste I used Duncan-Hines Dark Chocolate Frosting.
That way you have a triple layer of sweetness.
I think that my next batch is going to be chocolate-fudge cookies with macaroon filling and coconut-pecan icing. I’ve already been asked to make chocolate-chip cookie-cups with peanut-butter filling and chocolate icing but I hate peanut-butter. Someone else can make those. Maybe I’ll make sugar cookie-cups with apricot filling and cream cheese frosting. There’s a lot of combinations to try.
