Home-made Cookie Butter クッキーバター

Some time ago, we were into chocolate covered cookies; first from GODIVA and then we found a much cheaper alternative made by a German company called Bahlsen (#1, in the composite below). But over time both these kinds of cookies were sort of forgotten and migrated to the very back of the pantry. Recently, my wife found a tin of Godiva with some chocolate cookies remaining and few boxes of Bahlsen’s. We tasted them and, surprisingly, both tasted perfectly OK despite their age. My wife remembered that some time ago while leafing through the La Brea Bakery pastry cookbook there was a reference to using stale brownies, chocolate Madeleines or chocolate cake scraps and grinding them into crumbs to use as the filling in Bobka pastries such as Russian coffee cake or chocolate armadillos. She thought, ‘why not use these cookies the same way for muffins or other baked goods’.  So she started looking on the internet for recipes using cookie crumbs in muffins. She found several. Most of them used Oreo cookies but she thought, ‘substituting chocolate covered cookies should work too.’ Then she saw that the recipe she wanted to use called for “Cookie butter”. Well she didn’t have cookie butter and thought her project was “dead-in-the-water”. Then she found a recipe on line for home-made cookie butter and she was “back-in-business”.  But, before she could make the muffin she had to make the cookie butter. Since this was a work in progress we did not take a picture of the final product but the one below is very close. Cookie butters appear to be made from different kinds of cookies such as sugar cookie, peanut butter cookie, or Oreo cookie . Since this was made from chocolate covered cookies, this must be  “chocolate cookie butter”. 

The recipe is from  the “Beautiful Mess” website with some modifications. (As always)

Ingredients:
2 cups cookie crumbs (we used a chocolate covered cookie from Bhalsen called “Afrika”) (#1)
½ stick butter
½ cup condensed milk sweetened
¼ cup milk evaporated
water as needed

Directions:
Place the cookies in a Ziploc bag, seal, and crush them using a meat pounder. (#2) (We found the food processor couldn’t handle the cookies whole…it’s demonstration of displeasure with the situation was quite impressive!) Place the crumbled cookies into the food processor and pulse until it forms a very fine powder (#3).
In a small saucepan, heat the butter over low heat until melted, and then stir in the sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk until it’s all melted together (#4).
Starting with 1/2 cup of the liquid, pour it into your cookie crumbs and mix together with a spoon.
Keep adding small amounts of the liquid until the cookie butter is just wet enough to stay together (the first picture).

(The below are direct quote from the original recipe)
“Once your cookie butter is blended, allow it to cool in the fridge for an hour or two. If you want to, you can actually stop at this point, and it will taste delicious. But if you want to make the cookie butter smoother and easier to dip things in, then remove the cookie butter from the fridge and stir very small amounts of water (start with 1/8 teaspoon) into the dough. At first it will look like the water is separating from the dough, but just keep stirring and mashing. You should start to notice that the cookie butter loosens up a bit as you stir in more water. Keep adding and stirring until you get to a consistency you like and refrigerate the mixture again.  Store your cookie butter in the fridge and it should be good for at least a week or two.”




In any case, we have not used the cookie butter as a spread yet but it tasted rather good. We found out that our regular grocery store carries “Lotus Biscoff” cookie butter. We ordered it and will compare it with the one my wife just made. 

This just in: The“Lotus Biscoff” cookie butter arrived and we tasted it. As you can see in the picture above that it looks like peanut butter but tastes like….wait for it….a butter cookie!!