As I was strolling the holiday aisles at Target I found a section dedicated to seasonal baking goods. Of course they had box mixes for gingerbread and sugar cookies but I also found something that stood out; cookie butter flavored cookie cups by Favorite Day, Target’s house brand. That name is a mouthful but I don’t think you could shorten it. This dessert is cookie butter-flavored cookie cup with cookie butter flavored filling and caramel sauce. These sound amazing but I don’t see how they fit into the holiday season. The only noticeable thing is the box itself has a small square that says “the merriest”. Due to that little square on the packaging and where these were located in stores, I am adding these into the Christmas cookie competition. Let’s see if these have what it takes to show up on a Christmas cookie platter.
This mix has a couple more steps than a traditional cookie mix. Each element has to be prepared separately and then put together at the end. The cookie cups require melted butter and an egg to be combined with the mix. Once it is a dough, it is divided into 12 equal portions and each portion is rolled into a ball. This was easier said than done. The dough was quite sticky so I had to flour my hands between each ball otherwise the dough would start sticking to my hands again. I used a 1 tablespoon sized scoop for each ball but this was a little small and left me with extra dough. I decided to divide the extra dough up and add it into each ball so I still had the required 12 portions. The dough was tasty, it was sweet and tasted like cookie butter in a way, but it mostly reminded me of caramel flavor.
Each dough ball goes into a muffin cup cavity to be baked. The box calls for 10-12 minutes of baking and I found these cookies were perfectly baked at 12 minutes. It is so unheard of for a box mix to not only be correct but for the upper end of the bake time to be the accurate one, I was thoroughly shocked but very happy with this brand for being truthful. These cookies came out very puffed up and rounded on the top but evenly browned and very pretty. The next step requires you to make the cavity to turn these into cookie cups. While warm, press a shot glass into the center and press down. This was really easy and provided hardly any resistance. I let the cookie cups cool a little bit longer in the pan and then ran a butter knife around the edges to pop them all out of the muffin pan.
While the cookies cooled, I moved on to the next two steps. The directions on the box have you next make the caramel sauce. This combines melted butter, water, and the powdered mix. Together, this mixture goes into the microwave and is cooked for about a minute so it comes to a boil. Then you pull it out, mix it up, and set it aside for at least 5 minutes.
With the caramel sitting, and the cookies cooling, I moved onto the filling. You combine the filling mix and heavy cream and beat it in a mixer with a whisk attachment until it is whipped. This filling is a fancy whipped cream essentially. The powdered mix is made of flavoring, powdered sugar, and xanthan gum (for stability). It was very tasty and had the same cookie butter profile as the dough.
At this point, the cookies were cooled but the caramel had not set up. I kept waiting and checking on it but after awhile I gave up on it. Caramel should be very viscous and thick. The image of the cookies on the front of the box looked exactly like I would expect for a caramel consistency. However, this mixture never thickened. It never changed consistency and it remained a thin liquid. I left this on the counter and later on revisited it after the cookies had been eaten and hours had passed, it still never thickened. This was very disappointing.
Finally, it was time to assemble the cookies. Using a piping tip and a piping bag, I piped the filling into each cookie cup cavity and made it look as close in appearance to the box as I could with just as much filling. The filling was very stable so it held it’s shape nicely. Then I tried to pipe the caramel on top but it basically just poured over the cookies like water. Despite the terrible “caramel” topping, the cookies looked really good at this point. I did find that I had over half of the filling mixture and the caramel mixture leftover. This was so much leftover, I really wish the mix would have made more cookies or provided less filling. I felt bad throwing it out so I saved the filling mixture and later used the cookie butter flavored whipped cream as a topping in hot chocolate which ended up being a great use for it.
These cookie cups are amazing. The differences in texture of the cookie and the filling was fantastic and the cookie butter flavor profile was front and center and the caramel topping complimented it nicely. Don’t just take my word for it, you need to go pick up this box mix from Target and give it a try. It is a lot of steps compared to a traditional cookie mix but each step is relatively quick and easy. The only thing I would note is that you have to have almost 2 cups of heavy cream on hand for this mix. As for the Christmas cookie competition, having a filling that needs to be refrigerated and only making 12 cookies means I won’t be using this box mix for my Christmas cookie platter. They would be too out of place. So instead I would pick this box up again and make it just to eat all 12 of these cookie butter flavored cookie cups.
This mixture as prepared everything totaled 3555 calories. If divided into 12 this makes each cookie cup 296 calories. However about half of the filling and caramel were used and the box doesn’t breakdown the calories by each element so we won’t be able to figure out exactly how many calories these cookie cups were but they were definitely less than 296 since most of the calories came from the heavy whipping cream in the filling.
Leave a Reply