Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes, originally uploaded by bakingmonster.

Allright, let’s get it out of the way: these cupcakes were made of fail. Sure, they look good. But as for actually tasting anything like cookie dough, not so much.

It all started when Mr. Monster and I went to the restaurant supply store last weekend.  I had been asking (nagging) him to go for the last year, and since school is wrapped up for the year (yay!) and I have free time during the weekends again (double yay!), we finally went for a visit.  I had one goal: to find a 24-cup pan.  Yes, I have already several 12-cup pans.  Yes, I could just put two of them in the oven side by side like I’ve been doing.  But come on!  24 cups, now that means we’re in the big leagues.  And so we left the store with the 24-cup pan, a large cooling rack, and various other tidbits, me with a spring in my step and cupcakes on the brain.  I had to break in the pan, what should I make?

I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect cookie dough flavored frosting for awhile now.  Whenever I make cookies, I wind up eating what must be a cupful of the dough (much to Mr. Monster’s chagrin), and I wanted that same flavor in cupcake form.  And now was a perfect excuse to give it a whirl.  I decided to test a new recipe for vanilla cake and try a new technique for making the cookie dough buttercream.

Lesson 1: Don’t use a 24-cup pan on an untried recipe, unless you’re prepared to wind up with a whole bunch of crap.

For the cake recipe, I doubled the “Very Vanilla Chocolate Chip Cupcakes” from Julie Hasson’s 125 Best Cupcake Recipes.  For half the batch, I left out the chocolate chips, and for the other half I used mini chocolate chips.

I was a little disappointed with how the cake turned out.  The cake itself tasted too sweet to me, and the chocolate chips wound up sinking to the bottom of the cupcake.

Okay, so the cake turned out mediocre, but surely the amazing cookie dough frosting would make up for it, right?  Wrong-o.  I made my go-to vanilla buttercream, sans the vanilla extract, then made a half batch of Nestle Tollhouse cookie dough (sans the eggs) to mix into the buttercream.

Lesson 2: Don’t use random old dark brown sugar that has been in your cupboard for who knows how long.

Lesson 3: Don’t use Mexican vanilla as a key flavor when you’ve never tried it before and have no idea what it tastes like.

The cookie dough tasted a little funky to me, but I hoped that once it was mixed in with the buttercream and sprinkled with more mini chocolate chips, the flavor would mellow out.  Once it was all mixed together, however, it tasted like a grainy, faintly molasses-y, definitely non-cookie-dough-y buttercream.

And so I declared the numerous cupcakes (36!)  a failure and decided to pawn them off at work the next day.   The good thing about co-workers is that they’ll eat pretty much anything.  I even received positive feedback from the grazers, but I didn’t tell anyone what flavor the cupcakes were supposed to be when I abandoned them in the breakroom.  When I told them it was supposed to be chocolate chip cookie dough, they would say, “Oh.  Well, it was still good!”

The hunt for the perfect cookie dough cupcake continues…