Cookie Stuffed Cookies? Really?

I spend a lot of time (probably too much) surfing around looking for amazing cakes, nifty tutorials, recipes, blogs, and other things that I can use for Quick Bites posts at Capital Confectioners, the blog of my local cake club.

For the most part, that’s a lot of fun and very educational. But every once in awhile I stumble across something that genuinely shocks me in terms of what people are doing with desserts.

For instance: Cookie Stuffed Cookies on Serious Eats.

I’m flabbergasted.

On one hand, I can see how having one treat stuffed inside another might actually work, if the flavours were complementary and the outer cookie didn’t render the inner one mushy. On the other much more sensible hand, I know that those two qualifiers will be hard to achieve so my initial reaction is a hint of, “Eww,” tinged with, “Is this really necessary?” and a large side helping of, “If diabetes could have a single cause, this might be it.” The blog writer himself jokes that one should have insulin at the ready.

Then again, I strongly favour dark, rich desserts over sweets, so I don’t like Oreos in the first place. To be fair, that first photo of what I’m assuming will be a mushy Oreo might be colouring my entire perception of this baking concept. Also, I don’t like peanut butter and chocolate mixed together, but I know most people do, so again I may be viscerally reacting to those flavours in that post whereas others are saying, “Yum!”

And I do truly see how having a soft mint cookie might work very well inside of a dark chocolate cookie. Then again, maybe it’d be better to take a dark chocolate cookie recipe and experiment with adding a bit of peppermint oil.

Overall I see this as a bit oogy. I appreciate the experimental nature of the whole thing, but there’s a part of me that wants to cry out, “Why can’t a cookie just be its own cookie?” especially noting that the blog article frequently states that the outer cookie has a tendency to overshadow the flavour of the inner cookie. That is indicative of a bad pairing from the outset.

To me, there’s a fine line between a decadent combination and unceremonious shoving together of somewhat alike things. Stuffing inside of a chicken (while a difficult problem in terms of overall temperature management) is delicious; turducken sounds disgusting. One is a constructed combination of complementary flavours and textures; the other is gluttony.