A couple weeks ago I sponsored a contest at work, with the prize being a voucher good for one batch of baked goods of the bearer’s choice, made by me. I bake for the office once a week anyway, but I almost always bake what I feel like baking rather than taking specific requests. The voucher for baked goods seemed like a fun way to make something I was going to do anyway seem a little more special. I even made up a fancy-looking certificate for the occasion.

The contest came and went, the votes were tallied and the winner happened to be the person who is often most enthusiastic about the baked goods I bring to work. She didn’t know ahead of time that the prize was going to be MORE baked goods, so when I presented her with the certificate she was very excited indeed. Suggestions of key lime pie, peanut butter brownies and several other possibilities were bandied about, but in the end she decided she needed a few days to think about what she wanted.

A couple days later she sent me a link to a Pinterest page full of recipes of her prize choice: Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies.

I’ll admit, I was skeptical. I’m not a big Pinterest fan anyway (because gods know I don’t need yet another internet-based time suck in my life), and it seems like the number of cutesy Pinterest recipes that fail horrendously far outnumbers the ones that actually work. BUT…I said that I’d do the thing, so I was bound and determined to Do The Thing.

Several minutes of perusing the internet turned up quite a few non-Pinterest recipes, some of which weren’t even trying to be super cutesy, so I started to feel a little better about things. There were a couple that got all fancy with shit like browned butter and bourbon and whatever in the cookie dough…but fuck that. There’s no point in getting all artisanal when you’re taking the dough and mashing it around a mass-produced Oreo, in my opinion. Once I had that straight, things got a hell of a lot easier because it was a small logic hop from “I ain’t makin’ no fancy-ass cookie dough” to “hey, the grocery store has logs of pre-made cookie dough! I don’t have to make ANY dough at ALL!”

One quick trip to the grocery store later, I had procured a 2-lb log of chocolate chip cookie dough and a package of Double-Stuff Oreos. I preheated the oven, got my baking sheet lined with parchment, and commenced with what seemed like a quick and easy baking project.

And, to be fair, if it hadn’t been like 80 degrees in my kitchen before I even turned the oven on, things might have gone a little smoother.

The first couple were fine – I took  nice neat slices of cookie dough, flattened them out a little with my fingers and mushed them around the Oreos to cover them. There wasn’t much finesse required.  As the dough lost its chill things started to get messy, though. The chocolate chip cookie dough went from kind of Play-Doh consistency to…I don’t even know. Some kind of sticky, slimy, slippery goop. I had a total of four Oreos done at this point, by the way. It was like the light at the end of the cookie-making tunnel started speeding in the opposite direction. Feelings of desperation started to creep in.

Then, inspiration! I dug one of my flexible gel ice packs out of the freezer and put the log of dough on it for a few minutes. Things firmed up nicely and I was able to get on with the task at hand, though it was still slow going (that’s what she said? HAH). It ended up taking me almost forty minutes to wrap 15 Oreos in cookie dough.

Also, remember the part where I said I had bought TWO POUNDS of cookie dough? Yeah. I got 15 cookies out of that. I will admit that I probably ate two cookies’ worth while I was working (judge me all you want), but still, god damn. The label reckoned 1oz of dough per cookie, so I was using just over two cookies’ worth of dough to cover each Oreo. That means each one of these suckers is the caloric and sugar equivalent of THREE cookies. They should be called Diabetes Bombs.

All the recipes I looked at said to bake the cookies at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes. Maybe they like their cookies raw and impossible to move from the pan? I don’t know. Mine took like 20 minutes and they weren’t over-done by any means. Maybe my oven had just had enough at that point. Maybe it was like “this is ridiculous on SEVERAL LEVELS and I’m registering my disapproval by not coming up to the temperature you want. SO THERE.”

Finished product. Note: this picture ticks almost every box on the “Things Not To Do In Your Food Blog Pictures” list. About the only thing it’s missing is a cockroach, or maybe a dildo sitting in the background. PS:If you’ve got a dildo hanging out in your kitchen, I kind of want to hang out with you. But I’ve also got questions. A LOT of questions.

People at work lost their minds over them, declared them amazing, and wanted the “recipe”. I found them to be just ok, even when I tried one warm right from the oven. At first I thought maybe it was because I had eaten too much cookie dough while I was making them and therefore I wasn’t finding them appealing (which was true), but I tried part of one later on and then part of another one this morning and…nope. Still not super into them. They’re cloyingly sweet, which I’ve never been a fan of, even in desserts. Manipulating the cookie dough a bunch doesn’t do it any favors texture-wise, either. It all just seemed like a whole lot of unnecessary torturing of some perfectly good Oreos.

In the end, the person I was making the cookies for was very happy with them though, and that’s what counts.

Supposedly.