Attempt at Chocolate Chip Cookie Cupcakes

A favorite sweet at our house is classic chocolate chip cookies. Preferably made with Guittard semi-sweet chips if anyone is wondering...but nevermind, because this posting is not about the finer points of chocolate chip cookie perfecting (of which we've done plenty), it's about taking the great chocolate chip cookie and trying to find it's cupcake sibling. Kind of like a "brother from another mother" concept...only not really since this is just the baked goods world.

So upon setting out to try to make a cupcake taste just like a chocolate chip cookie, I sought one of my favorite cupcake bloggers, Chockylit, on her blog Cupcake Bakeshop. I was thrilled to see she was back from being on hiatus last year and revelled in all the cupcake finery she has produced. Searching and searching I could not find a chocolate chip cookie cupcake so I settled on a cake recipe that she made for Samoas cookie cupcakes. The cake recipe is called "Brown Sugar Butter Cupcake" so that sounded close enough for me.

I created the cake batter as instructed and then swirled in about a 1/3 of a cup of dark chocolate chips. I scooped the batter into cupcake cups and baked for about 20 minutes. The result...

OK, so I didn't know what or how to eat these. I decided to make some ganache for the top, at least just to add some gooey yumminess to them. On their own, the chocolate chip cookie cupcakes are somewhat uninteresting. Kind of like eating a cupcake without frosting, if you ask me...So, the next step involved making an icecream sundae out of the cupcake with ganache topper. Very yummy, especially when the cupcake was just barely warm still. A hit indeed! In our home, chocolate chip cookies (especially those baked in skillets) are often paired with vanilla icecream, so this step was not an unusual turn of events.

However, for practical cupcake purposes, this cupcake could not really be declared a success. I couldn't propose a new cupcake flavor that relies on icecream to make it yummy. In my experiment, I didn't want to bust out J's involved Italian Merengue Buttercream (nor do I really know HOW for that matter), so I discuss here a possible option for making this cupcake a servable reality. With the smooth ganache, the chocolate chip cupcake is definitely a dark chocolate lovers heaven, though it's not super-duper chocolatey like one of those double chocolate cupcake varieties. I propose the following actions: glide on a thin coating of dark chocolate ganache, refrigerate until set, then pipe (or pile on) some very lovely vanilla buttercream atop the shiney chocolate coating. This would have the effect of vanilla icecream, without the melty mess! There's something decadent about a double-frosted cupcake anyway, right?