What Kate Ate

Cookie dough is a strange creature. Everyone likes to eat cookie dough, but no one really considers it a legitimate treat. It’s one thing to eat a tube of Tollhouse when you are sitting around watching The Girls Next Door or Sound of Music in sweatpants with your friends on Thursday night. It’s quite another to say at the dinner table, “Why yes, cookie dough would round out this meal quite nicely.” Why is this so? Some people are afraid of salmonella and still hear their mother’s voice foreboding death upon raw dough consumption. Daft omnivores, just leave the eggs out! Also, cookie dough is seen as the lazy person’s dessert. It says, “Well, I was making cookies, but they looked so delicious, and I was too hungry to bother baking them, so I just ate the raw dough!” I say, if you want to eat cookie dough, eat it like you mean it! Stand and proclaim, “I just ate a spoonful of pure margarine, refined sugar, white flour, and vanilla extract, and I enjoyed it!”

Enter the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Brownie. This concoction is a recent vegweb favorite and appears to be adapted from similar nonvegan recipes out there through trivial substitutions. It comprises three layers: a brownie layer, a cookie dough layer, and a chocolate glaze. You bake the brownies, let them cool, spread cookie dough over them, and slather the whole thing in melted chocolate. The result is a classy dessert which embraces cookie dough as the foundation of a dish rather than closeting it as a shameful late night snack.

While the yields of the various layers were off–I ended up with several doughless brownies–these goodies are a trifecta of cake-like, fudgy, and crunchy. In fact, the brownies are so cake-like that referring to them as brownies is a transgression against the brownie gods. Slicing them was also a challenge-the lighter brownies sagged beneath the dense dough and hard topping. I had to use my sharpest chef’s knife to slice them apart.

Even though this recipe would benefit from a firmer brownie, I think we’d be hard pressed to find a person who did not enjoy this elopement of brownie and cookie, baked and unbaked, and chocolate and chocolate-chip.

Update! I brought these to a party at work, and my friend Alex said, “Well, I don’t usually eat dessert, but I have to save room for those.” He ate one and took about five home. By the end of the party, the entire pan (the size of a cookie sheet) was gone. Cookie dough brownies: SUCCESS.

So, I’ve never really liked mangoes. It’s not that I was scarred by a bad mango encounter. But they’ve always tasted….chemical-ish….to me. Like a delicious fruit that’s been dunked in a bucket of bleach. I do, however, like mango-flavored things, though it is often the case that fruit flavors taste nothing like the fruits themselves. Take banana. Banana-flavored things are, in general, nauseating. One exception to this rule are banana Runts. Are these vegan? I haven’t yet had the opportunity to check. It’s a shame if not, because they are the only example of delicious banana flavoring I know of. Don’t even get me started on banana Laffy Taffy. It is evil and putrescence in candy form.

Did I say this was about mangoes? So I really want to like mangoes. It’s silly, really. But they’re so darn pretty with their greenness and their pinkness and their yellowness. And lots of recipes use mango. So, I’ve been buying it. And I must say, it’s not half as bad as I remember. I learned from videojug.com how to cut it into pretty cubes, which already makes it twice as yummy as it would be otherwise.

So, I’ve been enjoying mangoes in my fruit salads and sometimes (blasphemous!) by themselves. They’re nice for something different. They’ll never come close to my beloved pineapple, but I think we can get along just fine.

Update: Runts are probably not vegan.  They contain stearates, which often come from animal fats.  Le sigh.