S'more Cookie Fingers

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Happy National S'Mores Day, everyone!

To celebrate this very important National Holiday (while using the ingredients on hand, which did not include full-sized marshmallows, phooey!) I decided to get creative and invent my own s'more-inspired dessert. I tossed around the idea of making a s'more pie (baked crust filled with a mixture of mini-mallows, chocolate chips, and graham cracker chunks, then heated in the oven until the marshmallows puff and the chocolate is soft and gooey) but decided I didn't want to do a pie crust. My reason is so lame - I didn't want to have to clean shortening off a measuring cup and pastry cutter!

My next idea was to make some sort of cookie. I eventually decided to make a cookie and top it with chocolate chips and mini-marshmallows. Sounded great, and all that was left was to find the right cookie recipe.

Looking online, I found a recipe for Cookie Clay Dough - it tastes like cinnamon grahams, and is made for the express purpose of being shaped. Little plug for this recipe - it is so awesome! It's healthier than some other cookie doughs, because it's made with whole wheat flour (ignore all the sugar and butter...). It's also really fun, because you can plop it on some wax paper in front of your kids and they play with it like Play-Doh (make sure they wash their hands first), then you bake their creations and they get to eat them! The other reason this recipe is so great is that the raw dough tastes incredible! If you have powdered egg product, use that instead of the raw egg because you're going to want to just snack on this dough without ever baking it! Or if you don't care about the salmonella risk, eat it with the egg (just so you know, I'll probably get salmonella after today, but it would be worth it for that dough).

S'more Cookie Fingers
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter (1 cube)
1 tsp. vanilla
1 egg (or 2 tbsp. dry egg powder and some water)
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. cinnamon

Topping:
Chocolate chips
Miniature marshmallows

Cream together the sugars, butter, vanilla, and egg (if using dry egg, add the powder with the dry ingredients). Add flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Mix well. If using the dry egg powder, now add 2-4 tbsp. water until the dough has a Play-Doh consistency. I used a regular egg, and ended up adding about a tablespoon of water at the end because it's really dry here.

At this point you can give the dough to your kids and say, "Look kids, edible play dough! Have at it!" They'll love you forever. But if you want to make cookie fingers, here's what I did.

Shape the dough into sixteen "boats" on ungreased baking sheets.

Fill the boats with about 7-8 chocolate chips.

Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and press 6-7 mini-mallows onto the chocolate chips.

Return to oven and bake for 3 more minutes, until the marshmallows are puffy and a tiny bit golden. The marshmallows look kinda like big white caterpillars, don't they?

Let cool in the pan for about 3 minutes, then remove to wire racks. The best time to eat these is right after you remove them from the pan - they're still a bit warm, the chocolate is soft, the mallows are gooey and stretchy, and it tastes so good! Once they've cooled, you can pop them in the microwave for a few seconds to get that warm, gooey texture again.


This will also be my sweet entry for the second August edition of I Love Baking. Who can resist a big round-up of delicious baked goods twice a month from all over the blogosphere?