I swear Jocelyn and I didn’t plan to do chocolate chip cookie posts back-to-back.  🙂  But I won’t blame you if you don’t believe me.  🙂

Of course, I already have a post on how to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies; which is all very well and good if that’s what you’re hankering for, and you actually have some gluten-free oats lying around.  But a while back I developed an intense longing not just for chocolate chip cookies, but for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.  (Which is quite possibly the longest dessert name there is where each word has its own individual meaning.)  And I knew if I could make the kind of cookie dough you keep in the freezer, I could bake cookies or put that dough in ice cream.  Or, as it turns out, both.  😀

It’s hardly a graceful process; you need something to shape the cookie dough into a tube, while still being able to pry the dough out once it’s frozen.  My solution is to pack the dough into a stiff disposable plastic cup, then “shell” the dough once it’s frozen and set, but I bet you could do it a lot of other ways, too.  Also, make sure to bake the cookies on parchment paper — they’re plenty rigid once they cool, but that just makes it even harder to scrape them straight off the cookie sheet in one piece.  It’s a lot easier to let them cool completely, then gently pick them up and peel the parchment paper off their undersides — not to mention it does its part to keep the undersides from burning.

As for the dough, you could add it to homemade ice cream if you want, and one of these days I probably will, but you can still get a really good quick-and-dirty version of the ice cream just by mixing lumps of dough and extra chocolate chips into some softened vanilla ice cream you already have.  That’s what I did.  But enough talk; there’s cookie dough to make.  🙂

Chocolate Chip Cookie (Dough Ice Cream)

Yield:  8 large cookies and enough cookie dough for a quart of ice cream; or 16 large cookies and no ice cream; or 2 quarts of ice cream 🙂

Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup butter, softened
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 1/4 cup dough mix
• 1/4 tsp xanthan gum
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup milk chocolate chips (or more, if you want extra to add to ice cream)
• optional — vanilla ice cream, store-bought or homemade

Directions:

1.  Making this dough is quick and easy.  Just grab your stand mixer and stick the paddle attachment on it.  You’ll mix the dough in four stages, letting each one combine thoroughly.  First, cream the butter and mix it together with the sugar and brown sugar (that’s the left-hand picture).  Second, add the egg and vanilla, and mix again (middle picture).  Then, add the dough mix, xanthan gum, baking soda, and salt, and mix the dough yet again (right picture).

2.  Grab a cutting board and chopping knife, and measure out your 1/4 cup chocolate chips.  If you wanted really big chunks of chocolate I suppose you could use them as is, but I like it better if the chocolate’s a little more uniformly distributed — and it helps make sure the little bitty chunks of dough in your ice cream later on aren’t about 70% chocolate chip.  So I chop them up like so, then gently mix them into the dough:

3.  Time to freeze the dough.  Use a floppy spatula to scrape it up and press it into a plastic cup (or whatever mold you’re using), then cover it with a ziploc and a rubber band, plastic wrap, or whatever works.  It takes a few hours for the dough to be frozen enough to be “shelled” and cut up, though for a really hard freeze you’d want to leave it overnight.

4.  Now you can cut the dough, either into slices to bake, or chunks to put in ice cream, or both!  To bake cookies, preheat the oven to 325 degrees F, and put the dough slices on parchment paper on a cookie sheet.  Bake in the preheated oven for 13-15 minutes.  Let cool completely before (usually) cutting them apart where they’ve climbed the fences and made friends, and moving them to a plate to serve.

5.  Meanwhile, if you like, mix up some chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream!  🙂  I’m so lazy; I just soften some vanilla ice cream, then mix in some more chocolate chips and chunks of cookie dough.  There’s nothing too exact about this process, just the proportions that suit you.

I like to serve a bowl of the ice cream with a half or whole baked cookie on the side; that way you can break off pieces of the cookie and use it as an edible spoon to ladle up the ice cream.  😀  Forget cookies and milk, here comes cookies in ice cream, on a cookie!