A few days ago, I made Impulse Buy Cookies. They are like chocolate chip cookies, but instead of chocolate chips they use the equivalent amount of whatever junky candy stuff you want to buy when you're in the supermarket. I got a Kit Kat bar, a Nestle Crunch bar, and some little chocolate-covered balls of peanut butter.
I must say that Impulse Buy Cookies are a great idea, so long as you can reliably yet impulsively buy chocolate chips. Otherwise, I have my doubts. Probably it's because I bought candy I don't actually like very much; I mainly bought the peanut butter candy because Sumana likes peanut butter candy, and the other stuff because it seemed suitably impulsive. The Kit Kat bar was a horrible idea; the heat of the oven made it tough and leathery. Plus, I forgot to put the egg in the cookies, so the dough was a little weird.
However, last night I redeemed the meta-dessert world with Ganache Cookies. Why ganache? Because I like ganache. Ganache has panache. Also, I had purchased way too much whipping cream and way too much block chocolate for my disastrous Chocolate Mousse Cake meta-dessert, so what better way to use it than in a substance made entirely of whipping cream and block chocolate?
For completeness, here is how you make ganache: take a half-pint of whipping cream and bring it to a boil. Add some flavorful thing like jam or vanilla or liquer. Chop up about 8 ounces of chocolate and put it in a bowl. Once the cream boils, take it off the heat and pour it over the chocolate. Mash everything together with a whisk and stir it. You now have ganache.
To make your cookies into Ganache Cookies, just make whatever kind of cookies you like as you would normally make them. Do not put anything hard like chocolate chips in the cookies, as the cookies need to be refrigerated and it's not pleasant to eat cold hard things. After the cookies have cooled a little bit, take each one by the edge and dip the other edge in the ganache. Then let them cool on wax paper. Keep them refrigerated unless you want a mess. Note: you will get a mess whether or not you want one. However, the cookies are very good.
Kevin and I speculated whether you could make an even more meta-dessert out of the cookies, the dessert equivalent of the turducken. Well, it's not that hard. Any time you have cookies you can use the cookies as the base of an ice cream cake or ice cream sandwiches. Then you can bake a regular cake, cut a hole in it, and put the ice cream cake inside like a file. Then you could use the entire thing to represent a single sugar molecule in a pecan pie the size of the earth, topped with moon-flavored ice cream (a tip: if you are pressed for time, you can substitute the actual moon).
Question for ganache experts: is there something I can add to the ganache to make it harder when cool, so that the cookies don't need to be refrigerated?
Update: Sumana says: "People who have snacked on your cookies uniformly pronounce them wonderful. You brought our receptionist to speechlessness."
Mon Aug 25 2003 17:12 Amazing Meta-Dessert Recipe Entry As Promised:
By now you have probably noticed that my fondness for the meta extendeds even to my culinary adventures. Dessert is the main playground of the meta in my cooking, because it's safer: the concept of "dessert" pretty much has transitive closure. You can take n desserts, apply some transformation to them, and you will probably still have a dessert. So I like to play with desserts that incorporate or are based on other desserts (eg. tiramisu or the world-famous Nutellamisu).
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