Taste the Blood of Chocula Part IV — Cookies

Welcome to part IV of Taste the Blood of Chocula, an ongoing attempt to make palatable recipes with a nostalgia driven corn monster cereal to celebrate a pagan holiday coopted by Western European culture then coopted again by capitalism. So far I’ve made drinks, desserts and brunch. In this time I’ve learned that, due to how Count Chocula contains minimal cocoa powder and seems to be mostly air by volume, it’s surprisingly difficult to get it to contribute to the flavor of a dish. Now, as the the time for putting sugar in myself once more draws nigh, I’ve decided to go back to basics.

Today I’ll be making cookie recipes. As far as baking goes, these are recipes I have more experience making. I’ve done a lot of cookie recipes including candy or snacks where those ingredients are added after the cookies are removed from the oven but before they’ve completely cooled. That way the candies solidify into the cookies but don’t melt or dissolve too much. As a result their textures and flavors stay distinct as you eat the cookie. I think I can get that same result with the Chocula.

It will not escape me today.

First Cookie

This is a modification of a recipe I’ve done for a few Halloweens now — pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. Nice and seasonal for October, the month we’re reminded that we prefer to mutilate pumpkins and set them on fire rather than eating them.

I’ve made slight changes to this recipe over time. The original version I worked from used milk chocolate chips, but one year I only had white chocolate chips and discovered that they paired better with the pumpkin flavor. I’ve stuck with using them ever since. This year I’m trying something new, or at least new for the pumpkin cookie recipe — adding pudding mix. I’ve been adding this to standard chocolate chip cookies for a while. It makes a chewier, cakier result that doesn’t crumble easily, and one problem I’ve always had with these pumpkin cookies is that the end result falls apart with the first bite. The other benefit is that it’s a quick and easy way to add flavor. Lemon or butterscotch pudding pair well with white chocolate chips, and chocolate pudding is an easy way to make chocolate-chocolate chip cookies. This time I’m using vanilla pudding, as I want something that complements the Chocula and the pumpkin without being an overpowering flavor on its own.

White Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Chocula Cookies

-2 sticks of butter, softened

-3/4 cup granulated sugar

-1 cup light brown sugar

-2 eggs

-1 tsp vanilla extract

-1 cup canned pumpkin

-3 cups flour

-2 tsp baking soda

-1/2 tsp salt

-1 tsp cinnamon

-1/2 tsp ginger

-1/4 tsp nutmeg

-1/4 tsp cloves

-1 8 oz package vanilla pudding mix

-3/4 cup white chocolate chips.

-Count Chocula, to decorate

Mix butter until smooth. Gradually add in granulated and brown sugars, mixing between each amount added. Add eggs one at a time, mixing after each. Then add vanilla and canned pumpkin, mix all ingredients together.

In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and vanilla pudding mix. Add this dry mixture to the wet mixture in small amounts, mixing between each addition. Add white chocolate chips.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Spoon generous tablespoons of dough onto the sheet, leaving space in between each spoonful. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or until cookies are browned on the edges.

As soon as you remove cookies from the oven, decorate with Chocula pieces, pressing them into the tops of the cookies. Then remove to a wire rack and let cookies cool.

And the result?

To start with, the cereal texture comes through this time. There’s a crunch to the bites with Count Chocula. It’s not a strong crunch, mind you. Less like crisped rice in chocolate, more like a chocolate bar with a potato chip in it. Or popcorn. But it’s definitely there. There’s no added flavor from the puffed corn pieces, but there is a little extra sweetness coming through in the bites with marshmallow. So when it comes to getting Chocula to contribute, this is about what I could have reasonably hoped for. Hooray?

As for the cookie itself, it’s good. The pumpkin flavor is a little weaker than I remember from other times I’ve made it. The vanilla pudding mellowed it out. In terms of texture, it doesn’t fall apart anymore so that’s a success. It’s also cakier than I remember it being, again a result of the addition of the pudding mix. Last time I made these the result was somewhere in between a chocolate chip cookie and pumpkin bread. This time it’s light and airy, like a snickerdoodle. Kind of reminds me the cookie halves of a whoopie pie.

Hold on a second, I’ll be right back.

Yeah, that’ll work. After making a single serving whoopie pie filling (butter, marshmallow fluff, sugar, vanilla) I’m happy with taking this cookies and turning them into whoopie pie halves.

Second Cookie

With my other cookie recipe I decided to use another thematically appropriate ingredient.

In case it wasn’t apparent, I have a sweet tooth. I look for ways to add sugar or sweetness to most things I cook, and for methods to pair sweet flavors with ingredients that aren’t typically paired with unhealthy amounts of sugar, even in 21st century America.

For years now one ingredient I keep returning to with this obsession is garlic.

A couple years back I went to a restaurant that served a garlic dulce de leche dipping sauce as part of a cheese plate. I was impressed by how will it worked, and last year I finally made it myself for the first time. I looked up other sweet garlic recipes, including finding a cookie recipe from some kind of garlic propaganda site, and even they approached the concept with an attitude of “technically you can do this but we don’t necessarily recommend it”. So I just talked about making garlic chocolate chip cookies but never did it.

Today I am calling my own bluff.

Roasting garlic lets off a slightly sweeter version of its flavor and infuses well into fats. So when I kept hearing people talk up brown butter chocolate chip cookies recipes, where the butter is melted and nearly caramelized as the first step in the cookie recipe, that seemed like the step that would make the most sense if I wanted to infuse garlic flavor. So using Bon Appetit’s brown butter chocolate chip cookie recipe as a template, I made these:

Vampire Killers

-2 sticks butter

-18 cloves of roasted garlic

-2 cups flour

-1 tsp baking soda

-3/4 tsp kosher salt

-1 cup brown sugar

-1/3 cup granulated sugar

-2 eggs, room temperature

-2 tsp vanilla extract

-2/3 cup dark chocolate chips

-Count Chocula, to decorate

Take 2 bulbs of garlic, separate into individual cloves. Remove outer skin layer from cloves and cut off hardened end of each clove. Roast individual cloves in oven, wrapped in aluminum foil and sprinkled with salt and olive oil, until they begin to turn golden brown. Set aside.

Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring frequently until it foams and then browns. Place into bowl. Add 18 garlic cloves. Mash garlic cloves in butter, then mix. Let cool slightly.

Add dry ingredients (flour, baking soda and salt) into a separate bowl. Mix.

Add brown sugar and granulated sugar to butter and garlic mixture. Mix until mixture is as blended as possible. Add eggs and vanilla. Mix until mixture thickens. Gradually add dry ingredients, about a third at a time, mixing steadily in between additions. Add dark chocolate chips, mix enough to spread throughout cookie dough.

Let dough sit at room temperature for a half hour.

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place spoonfuls of dough onto paper, leaving generous space for cookies to spread out. Bake at 375 degrees for 10 minutes or until edges are golden brown.

Remove cookies from oven. Immediately decorate by pressing Chocula into the tops of the cookie. Let cool on baking sheet for 10 minutes, then switch to wire rack for additional cooling.

I should note that I only made a half batch of these. I wasn’t sure how they would come out, and didn’t want to have a bunch of extra cookies I didn’t want to eat sitting around, judging me for my hubris.

Also, you may look at the recipe and go, “That seems like a lot of garlic. Possibly too much?” And yes. That is the correct amount of garlic. If the amount of garlic in your recipe cannot be described by that reaction, you are not using enough garlic and this is true of any recipe with garlic in it.

So how does it taste?

Like garlic. Like a lot of garlic. Like a murdering an entire city worth of vampires of garlic.

It’s . . . not . . . bad? I think? The cookie and the garlic actually go together well. Or at least pair better than the other flavors. I’m not sure about how the garlic pairs with the chocolate, even after eating it. Although I do think that dark chocolate was the right call rather than milk chocolate or white chocolate. The bitterness is a better match for the strong garlic flavor. It might work?

The crunch of the Chocula is more noticeable here because this cookie isn’t as cakey as the pumpkin one. The marshmallow, on the other hand, is entirely destroyed by the garlic, with no trace of its sweetness surviving the overpowering garlic flavor.

Mostly what I’m taking away from this is my tastebuds are confused. I like all the individual pieces going on here. I don’t know how I feel about all of them together because I might have stepped out of culinary regular horror into culinary cosmic horror and ended up at a taste the human brain was never meant to process.

But if you’re the type of person who believes no garlic is too much garlic you may want to experience this for yourself, just to know.

What can I claim to have learned from all of this?

-I have found a way to cook with Count Chocula that still preserves the experience of eating Count Chocula, and it involves not cooking it at all and then putting it on top at the end. Success?

-I’ve got a pumpkin whoopie pie recipe I’m pretty happy with and wasn’t expecting that when I started.

-I’ve got a second recipe for a cookie that is making me question reality as we know it and our limited abilities to perceive it. Also good?

Closing Thoughts

It only took me more than half a month to find a recipe that didn’t annihilate Count Chocula’s texture. I hope to build on that into Part V when I’ll be returning to actual meals.