Teen Martha won’t be a teen for much longer. She turned 19 last week. One of our traditions is that the birthday person gets to choose his or her birthday meal. This has resulted in many creative endeavors with me trying to fulfill their wishes. This year was no exception. Teen Martha asked for chicken breasts stuffed with cheese, blueberry muffins, carrots with honey and dill, cauliflower with Parmesan cheese, and for dessert a cookie dough cake or cupcakes. I scratched my head at this one a bit and did some googling. I soon determined there were a couple of options: cookie dough cheesecake, cookie dough cupcakes (a cake bakes too long and would cook the dough too much) or a layer cake with a layer of cookie dough inserted after baking. Teen Martha preferred the cupcakes.

I used Martha’s recipe from her Cupcakes book for buttermilk yellow cupcakes. For the cookie dough center, I used this recipe from AllRecipes.com. I used my cookie dough scooper and made exactly 24 balls of dough which I froze. Then I filled the cupcakes up 1/3 of the way with batter, put the dough ball in the center, and filled the rest of the way with batter. Next time I would make the balls a little smaller and be careful not to overfill the cupcakes (some of them just ran all over the place). They took a really long time to bake – about 40 minutes. And even so, some of them sank in the middle when I took them out.

I made up a frosting in the Cuisinart with butter, powdered sugar, cocoa, milk, and some melted chocolate. They were hard to frost and the edges kept breaking off, so this was not anything gorgeous to look at, but it tasted really good and it satisfied Teen Martha’s craving for cookie dough! There’s just something about cookie dough…