Homemade vegan chocolate chip cookie butter, plus a frosting to use it

Confession time:

I hate cookie butter.

There. I said it. I hate peanut butter’s sexier, slightly fatter older sister, the pet poodle of the food blog world and dessert lovers everywhere, the “personal crack” of at least five million Trader Joe’s-shopping, Biscoff-toting speculoos addicts around the world. Bite me.

Peanut butter chocolate cookie dough-studded dark cocoa brownies with candied almond crust, banana pudding swirls, and hazelnut chocolate drizzle, plus sprinkles

Hi, friends, it’s Baby June! and we’re back with another episode of #CookingWithRandomShit and #FMLFridays. Even though it’s not Friday.

But seriously, FML.

I wish I was half that classy flipping the bird. source

Vegan peanut butter and jelly sugar cookie sandwiches

Recently, I’ve begun to feel that yes, I have had a dream like that.

Bacon polenta pancakes with peanut butter caramel

Bacon. Bacon bacon bacon. A love that never ends.

Probably the most monotonous and predictable thing about the internet is its love of bacon. It is literally a salt-cured piece of fat that works well in both sweet and savory contexts and possesses the most satisfying crispiness, thus fitting the basic criteria for deliciousness (as demonstrated in Salt Sugar Fat, which I found is basically a guidebook for making addictive food in the comfort of your own home)—so the fact that millions of people feel the need to worship this meat product both online and IRL is quite unsurprising. I am always shocked when someone says they don’t like bacon. Like my mom. My mom doesn’t like bacon. 

God, what a hipster. source

And, as expected, the most common rebuttal to a vegan or vegetarian diet is simply that. Bacon. Who can live without it? How can you stand to exist without consuming this one godly food?

Fortunately, bacon is probably one of the easiest foods to replicate. As I said, it is, to an untrained palate (like mine), a mass of salt and fat with a smoky flavor and pleasant crunch. Well damn if I can find something that is not dead animal flesh and possesses one of those attributes. 

Damn! source

The art of frosting a cupcake

I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of sick of cupcakes.

There are plenty of Wall Street analyses of the gourmet cupcake business out there on the interwebs.  The details vary, but essence of the story seems to begin with Magnolia Bakery, the rise of gourmet cupcake businesses and chains across the country, and a mad dash for buttercream, followed by declining popularity over time as people start to realize that cupcakes, frankly, are rather overrated.

Some bitter little fuckers feel the need to bash cupcakes with their oh-so-sophisticated hipster sensibilities, but I won’t sink to that level. Now, I am not keen on those cutesy, overpriced buttercream megaliths either. There’s a good reason for that, and it’s not because my precious palate can’t stand a bit of sweetened butter. Mostly because I have shopping guilt. 

I feel like a fucking criminal spending two fifty on a latte, much less fivebucks for a small, crumbly cake covered in oily frosting. source

Big blue minivan cake

Who wants to make a cake for their minivan?

Wow. Sexy. source

Okay, let me rephrase that question. Who wants to make a cake? A big one? With lots of frosting?

When cake is the question, yes is always the answer. Obviously.

But my family does indeed have an emotional connection to our minivan. The minivan is a symbol of suburban life, of gas-guzzling trips across town lines in search of groceries and movie theaters, of mothers carting their children to soccer practice and violin lessons, of the frantic, scattered lifestyles we have in this weird western world. We have traveled many miles in this van—from Cape Cod to, well, Cape Cod again (forgive our lack of creativity in family vacations).

Two hundred thousand miles, in fact.

Irish cream chocolate cake truffles

We’ve all heard that old saying: when life gives you shitty cake, make cake truffles.

Frosting cake ain't easy. source

No? Well, it’s true. Life itself may not give you cake, crappy or not, (much as I wish it would), but you can certainly make cake truffles whenever you fuck up a recipe and end up with a pile of mushy, crumbly mystery substance on your hands.

Throughout my short baking career, I have successfully fucked up what seems like a thousand recipes. I have filled the entire house with smoke when roasting plums and, after proceeding successfully for the first 99% of the recipe, caused a cake to crumble all over the countertop after removing it from the pan five minutes too early. I have even added four times the amount of butter necessary to a basic chocolate cake recipe when I misread “¼ cup butter” for “2 sticks”.

Cookies for breakfast

There is a reason why they say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It is, as I have said before, the only meal (besides dessert—which of course is also very important) where it is acceptable to eat cake as the main dish. It is a baffling tradition, but one that we must fulfill nonetheless—and what better way to fulfill it than to eat a bowlful of cookies?

Murica. source

Let’s ignore the fact that, theoretically, this would produce the greatest cereal milk to ever grace this earth.

I myself have never eaten the stuff—my evil parents refused to let my brother and I consume such fare, relegating us to those grossly flavored oatmeal packets since we were tiny, impressionable children.  It’s a tragedy, really. What is childhood without Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms? Frankly, I don’t know shit about those traditional kid foods, but that doesn’t stop me from lusting after sugary cereals every time I tag along my mother to the grocery store. Deprivation, I say. Post traumatic oatmeal disorder.

Just looking at this label makes me throw up a little in my mouth. Oh, the memories. source