16
votes
Best way to recycle cookies?
Hey everyone, I've recently made a large batch (90ish) of cookies trying to repurpose brownie mix. It's the Ghirardelli kind if you've seen it before.
On the plus side, the texture's great, it looks like a cookie, and it's chewy like the edge pieces of a brownie. It's very chcolatey, and you can see obvious chunks of chocolate. On the minus side, it's extremely sweet.
Does anyone have ideas on how to use this somewhere else less sweet?
Some ideas I've had so far include crushing the cookies into chunks, and using those chunks to make more cookies (all the ingredients except sugar), like how one would reuse old asphalt do when repaving a road. Another idea is making a cake with these scattered throughout, or using it as a cheesecake crust.
From my wife, who's a much more experienced baker than I:
"Try freezing one. If it doesn't turn into a rock, use them for ice cream sandwiches, since cold things taste less sweet. Maybe crumble them up to use as a cookie crust, but if they're particularly chewy you won't get a good texture. Really, just throw them away so that you don't waste new ingredients chasing a good result."
OP could also cut the cookies into smaller pieces, and turn it into biscotti, with another low and slow bake to completely dry it out. They can then dip that into tea/coffee, which will cut the sweetness. And it will also last longer that way too.
ooh biscotti is a good idea
Biscotti sounds fun, it's on the list now
Throw them away? Before doing that, I'd suggest OP look into donating them or something. Kids love overly sweet stuff, so maybe a family member or friend will be willing to take some. Maybe even for a price. Idk.
Fair enough. The goal was not to send good ingredients after bad. If there's someone out there who would eat them, that works too.
You don't want to use high sugar content cookies alone as crusts for anything particularly liquid. They'll melt and turn into sticky goo. It's why Graham crackers and vanilla or bitter chocolate wafers are used to make cold pie and cheesecake crusts rather than sweeter cookies.
OTOH, you could make a crumble, crisp, or cobbler topping (basically, pulse 3 cups of crushed cookies plus 1 cup uncooked oatmeal with 1/2 cup cold butter, maybe 1/2 tsp cinnamon, in a food processor, then hand crumble) out of them for a pie, bread, or bars. They'd probably go well on something with strawberries or other tart fruit.
Or use them in a babka, substituting crushed cookies and butter for the filling and making the streusel with cookies.
Hard to use up 90 cookies worth this way, but if you dry crushed cookies in the oven like biscotti, you could keep the crumbs for quite a while.
I have an ice cream maker so my immediate thought is to crumble them and put them into vanilla ice cream.
However, 90 cookies is a lot so another thing to try would be a bread pudding. You could let them lie out to get stale, crumble them and mix them with an unsweetened french or sour dough bread and soak them in an egg and milk mixture which you then bake. Chocolate bread pudding is delightful, and leaving the sugar out of your custard and mixing in the other bread would definitely cut the sweetness.
Bread pudding sounds amazing, I think I'll give it a try.
Rum balls. Add some crushed vanilla wafers and rum. Roll into balls, roll in chocolate sprinkles. Freeze what you can't eat.