The Chocolate Chip Cookie Bowl Sundae

June 18, 2009 9:17 AM

Ice cream sundaes are good, but what if you could eat the bowl? On a suggestion from his son, Michael Ruhlman, food writer and critic, figures out how to make a chocolate chip cookie ice cream bowl... and tells you how to do it too.
posted by SansPoint (60 comments total)

Waffle bowls work better. Easier to make and less melty, too.
posted by rokusan at 9:21 AM on June 18, 2009 [2 favorites]

And again, the insidious Wonka agenda works its way further into the American way of life.
posted by davelog at 9:22 AM on June 18, 2009 [3 favorites]

But does he condescend to us while doing it? Because otherwise, I think it would just be too confusing and un-Ruhlman for me.
posted by mudpuppie at 9:22 AM on June 18, 2009

Depend on what it was made of. Chocolate chip cookie: good. Glass: probably not.

Also, isn't that kind of the whole concept behind an icecream cone?
posted by delmoi at 9:22 AM on June 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

This looks fun, but I have to say that I'm deeply skeptical of his ratio BS, and I'm made more skeptical when his recipes don't even follow that ratio. I've basically taken the 123 cookie dough (1 part sugar, 2 parts fat, 3 parts flour) and made a 111 cookie dough, plus an egg, and chocolate chips of course.

Maybe if the recipes you use in, you know, actually cooking don't meet support your idea, you need to revise it.
posted by OmieWise at 9:24 AM on June 18, 2009 [2 favorites]

Next week: how to make a PB & J WITH A TORTILLA!
posted by BitterOldPunk at 9:25 AM on June 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

I hate edible bowls. I hate them so much. What good are they? You still need a plate. It's not an improvement at all. And there's an inherent tension between making something taste good and making something a food container. I reject this meaningless indulgence. If I want chili and bread I will have chili and then good bread. Not chili and too much bread that will be soggy and I have to eat at a pace dictated by the volume of chili remaining. I don't want a to big chocolate chip cookie with cold ice cream sweat. I want a cookie and some ice cream.

Fuck edible bowls.
posted by I Foody at 9:28 AM on June 18, 2009 [35 favorites]

I remember as a kid you could get these waffle clamshell things to have ice cream instead of cones.

And it needs a chocolate spoon, really, because there's just not enough calorific fatty goodness in ice cream on its own.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:30 AM on June 18, 2009

Is there a recipe for preparing the child, once it has stuffed itself with the sugary filling?
posted by orme at 9:35 AM on June 18, 2009 [10 favorites]

I would like to get one of those KFC bowls and then pour the ingredients into this. How awesome to find dessert at the bottom!!!
posted by poppo at 9:36 AM on June 18, 2009 [2 favorites]

I'm with I Foody on the edible bowl front, though it's certainly an improvement over Domino's Bread Bowl Pastas.
posted by mkultra at 9:38 AM on June 18, 2009

Related.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:38 AM on June 18, 2009

If I want chili and bread I will have chili and then good bread. Not chili and too much bread that will be soggy and I have to eat at a pace dictated by the volume of chili remaining.

I believe you have never been skiing or snowboarding where they offer the chili (or chowder) bread bowl. Because if you had, you would realize that this is the best thing ever. Plus, a good sourdough bread bowl will hold it's own against chili or chowder for quite a while. Or maybe you will be voracious enough to devour the contents of the bowl while they are still scalding, but you are too hungry (and any warm food is now too delicious) to care otherwise.

But I do agree that the edible containers usually require their own containers, with ice cream cones being the exception, not the standard. The magic of the edible container is not that you do away with washing dishes, but the container is infused with the flavors and essence of the contents, assuming the contents don't weaken the container to the point of critical failure.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:40 AM on June 18, 2009

Is there any good edible container other than the ice-cream cone? Which is specifically designed to fail gracefully as you eat it.
posted by smackfu at 9:41 AM on June 18, 2009

HELL YES FUCK THOSE EDIBLE BOWLS

Unless they are made of crispy noodles and contain tasty seafood

But upon reflection FUCK THEM EDIBLE BOWLS!!

O dear please stop screaming.
posted by longsleeves at 9:42 AM on June 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

I would like to get one of those KFC bowls and then pour the ingredients into this.

You just made my tapeworm throw up in my mouth a little bit.
posted by infinitywaltz at 9:44 AM on June 18, 2009 [2 favorites]

I believe you have never been skiing or snowboarding where they offer the chili (or chowder) bread bowl.

So you're saying that if you're desperately hungry, they're actually not too bad.
posted by echo target at 9:45 AM on June 18, 2009

Skiing or snowboarding aside.
posted by longsleeves at 9:46 AM on June 18, 2009

But.. you can eat the bowl! I mock the chowder-in-sourdough tourists in San Francisco. We have real food here, too.

Also: this recipe seems wildly impractical for the home cook. Each bowl requires two real bowls that nest, you bake the cookie/bowl inbetween them. I'm sure you all have eight pairs of oven-safe nesting bowls in your cupboard, right?
posted by Nelson at 9:49 AM on June 18, 2009 [4 favorites]

I Foody: I hate edible bowls.

Eponysterical!
posted by marginaliana at 9:49 AM on June 18, 2009

Perhaps they could fashion some sort of cone shaped device out of this.
posted by dirtdirt at 9:51 AM on June 18, 2009 [2 favorites]

Maaaan, imagine if you could smoke the doobage van after you finished all the weed! On a suggestion from Cheech and Chong...
posted by not_on_display at 9:51 AM on June 18, 2009

Homemade Ice Cream Sandwich. Perfect match of ice cream and cookie flavors of your choice.
posted by theora55 at 9:58 AM on June 18, 2009

In semi-related news, I made this for lunch today. It was oh so good, and makes me feel oh so bad. (Yes, it's a half-quart of heavy cream per sandwich.)
posted by jbickers at 10:00 AM on June 18, 2009

I'm sure you all have eight pairs of oven-safe nesting bowls in your cupboard, right?

Who says I'll be making one for anyone but me?

And also, your favorite food container sucks.
posted by Pantengliopoli at 10:03 AM on June 18, 2009

What about bowls made out of candy glass?
posted by backseatpilot at 10:04 AM on June 18, 2009

know what I'm going to do... I'm going to take two pieces of dough, make little flat breads with them, then put a beef patty between them... I'm gonna sell millions of these!

Then I'm going to make one of them REALLY flat, bend it almost in half, bake it on a hot rock until it is crisp, and fill it with, get this... loose burger stuff, or chicken, or fish, and then I'm gonna put salsa and cheese and stuff on it.. I'm selling a million of these too...

Then...this is the best... I'm going to take that dough and make a bigggggg flat bread, and put, I don't know, maybe tomato sauce on it, and cheese, and ham, and anchovies, and other stuff...I'm gonna sell billions of them...

So, the big deal here is what?
posted by HuronBob at 10:06 AM on June 18, 2009

"I think you'll find, Mr. Bond, that everything at this table is... quite edible. When you're finished with your iced cream, you simply eat the bowl. When you're finished with the bowl, the spoon is biscotti, with a hardened chocolate shell."

"You'll never get away with this."

"But I already have, Mr. Bond. Your martini glass becomes your after-dinner mint. The toothpick for your olive: a slurry of digestive enzymes that has been formed and pressed into shape. And your napkin, with which even now you are dabbing at your lips..."

"No..."

"Yes, Mr. Bond. A fruit roll-up."

"Blofeld, you're mad."
posted by logicpunk at 10:08 AM on June 18, 2009 [20 favorites]

Homemade Ice Cream Sandwich. Perfect match of ice cream and cookie flavors of your choice.

As Ruhlman ackowledges in the article: "I also know that making a cooking to serve ice cream on, such as an ice cream sandwich, is a common one"
posted by ericb at 10:13 AM on June 18, 2009

Amateur.
posted by w0mbat at 10:14 AM on June 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

Fuck edible bowls.

I'm having a tortilla salad today for lunch just to prove how wrong you are.
posted by GuyZero at 10:14 AM on June 18, 2009 [2 favorites]

Who would even think of eating anything more right after eating an entire ice cream sundae?
posted by Zambrano at 10:17 AM on June 18, 2009

Who would even think of eating anything more right after eating an entire ice cream sundae?

Disgusting fat Americans amirite Zambrano?
posted by peep at 10:20 AM on June 18, 2009 [2 favorites]

For those who don't want to make a bowl out of their cookie dough, maybe the Cookie Cake Pie is more your style.
posted by peep at 10:23 AM on June 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

Edible bowls/containment vessels have their places. The best are the ones that you do not realize are in fact edible bowls. Food like tarts, jelly filled donuts, cream puffs, wraps, etc all come prepared in an edible shell and do not need plates. So for those that say nah to the edible bowl... I say look around you just might have used one today. Nice post I bet kids find these fun.
posted by Mastercheddaar at 10:26 AM on June 18, 2009

but what about sandwiches and baguettes and paninnis? are these not similarly doughy chasis of deliciousness? are these not simply edible bowls by other means in spirit if not in name?
posted by doobiedoo at 10:43 AM on June 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

SansPoint: "chocolate chip cookie ice cream bowl"

Puff, puff, pass.
posted by Plutor at 10:44 AM on June 18, 2009

You mean like this? Yeah - these are available for sale at the Dairy Queen that's 8 blocks from my house. I don't eat them though. They look great but that's enough caloric intake for 3 days, at least.
posted by PuppyCat at 10:48 AM on June 18, 2009

Just for the record. I like wraps, I like sandwiches, I like ethiopian food (though really I don't much like the soggy bottom sheet of injera), and I like tacos. I don't care for pop tarts or jelly doughnuts, but I have no philisophical objection to them. But none of these things are edible bowls! The taco is not offered as an alternative to eating a pile of seasoned ground beef and lettuce and cheese, the sandwich is not an alternative to eating a stack of coldcuts and cheese, the jelly doughnut is not an alternative to eating a ...pile... of jelly. I'm not against pastas with toppings or pilafs. The bread bowl is an alternative to eating a bowl of soup and it's an inferior alternative. I'm not a monster. Food can contain food, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. The edible bowl is a shitty way to do it.

The taro nest is a special case because noodles are meant to be soggy so this alone get's a pass on the edible bowls front
posted by I Foody at 11:04 AM on June 18, 2009 [5 favorites]

but a wrap is just a flexible edible bowl! the edible bowl is in fact the retroactive ancestor of the sandwich, kinda like how the spork is actually the primordial, ur cutlery that we accidentally uncovered 50 000 leagues under my kitchen sink.
posted by doobiedoo at 11:16 AM on June 18, 2009

The absolute nadir of edible bowls are those horrid DQ Waffle Bowls. I can't recall ever putting something so artificial-tasting in my mouth. And, they aren't crispy, yet they aren't soggy. They exist in this odd non-texture world. Just...utter fail.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:22 AM on June 18, 2009

I hate edible bowls. I hate them so much. What good are they?

You are as one dead to me.

They are good for soaking up tomato-basil soup until the bread is mushy, yet still tangy-sour-dough-y, you philistine. I bet you freak when you get gravy in with your peas, too.
posted by Slap*Happy at 11:23 AM on June 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

jbickers: "In semi-related news, I made this for lunch today. It was oh so good, and makes me feel oh so bad. (Yes, it's a half-quart of heavy cream per sandwich.)"

That sounds delish, but I'm kinda afraid to eat something called a "hot brown". Sounds....dirty.

And all of you bread-bowl hating fuckers can suck it. *thppppt*
posted by notsnot at 11:52 AM on June 18, 2009

Waffle bowl with a cookie or a brownie under the ice cream. Problem solved, and it took half the work and 0% of the pretention.

That said these do look good, not that i would take the time to make them.

I'm a consumer whore and love edible containers:

"I ate the soup, i ate the bowl the only thing i didn't eat was the fork"-The sklar brothers
posted by djduckie at 11:54 AM on June 18, 2009

Food bowls: I make a wheat bread "pouf", for lack of a better term, where when you crack the top of it, salad poufs out. Imagine a pita, only expanded, and when you hit it with a fork, it's filled with yummy, yummy salad. (I guess you could stuff it with anything that isn't goopy.)

It's really more of a presentation thing than a "hear, eat your salad bowl" sort of thing though. It just looks really neat to serve something fully enclosed, so that people expect it to be something hot like soup or calzone, but then have it filled with crisp, cold greens.


As to cookie bowls, Paula Deen was doing this 25 years ago at her place in S.C. Of course hers had more butter. Which is only to be expected.
posted by dejah420 at 11:54 AM on June 18, 2009 [2 favorites]

As an ice cream bowl: meh. However, as a cookie base for my as-yet-unrealized culinary dream, the chocolate chip cookie / brownie hybrid: possibly genius.
posted by rusty at 12:00 PM on June 18, 2009

Amateurs.
posted by mazola at 12:03 PM on June 18, 2009

>That sounds delish, but I'm kinda afraid to eat something called a "hot brown". Sounds....dirty.

A religious war-mongering Mexican pizza place my friend dragged me to has a dish called the Brownsville Wet 'N Cheesie. It was pretty much as bad as it sounds, if that's even possible.

I will never go there again.
posted by Juliet Banana at 12:12 PM on June 18, 2009

doobiedoo: The spork actually derives originally, like all cutlery, from the evolutionary junction of rock + stick. Millions of years ago, rock evolved into flattish rock, while at the same time, stick first became pointy stick, and later two-pronged pointy stick (or "twok"). Flattish rock then gave root to two new branches: sharp-edged flattish rock, and round flattish rock. Round flattish rock eventually joined with the original stick and became what we would now recognize as spoon. Sharp edged flattish rock became knife, and has remained more or less the same since. Twok continued to evolve, passing through "threek" (which still exists, but is rarely seen today) and reaching its current four-pronged status as "fork." And finally, spoon and fork have merged to produce the modern spork.

Some peleocutlerists have theorized that spork is actually an earlier ancestor of spoon, positing an intermediate stage they call "rough-edged rounded flattish rock," but the evidence is scanty, and what there is is indistinguishable from mere sample degradation. The Sporkists popular books promoting the theory continue to sell briskly, but few respectable researchers take it seriously.
posted by rusty at 12:21 PM on June 18, 2009

Also: this recipe seems wildly impractical for the home cook. Each bowl requires two real bowls that nest, you bake the cookie/bowl inbetween them. I'm sure you all have eight pairs of oven-safe nesting bowls in your cupboard, right?

I do, in fact. I am a kitchen lunatic. I still wouldn't use a dozen or more oven-safe bowls to make edible cookie bowls, because washing them is a pain in the neck.

At a glance, I suspect you could form these cookie bowls by draping the dough over the cups of an upside-down muffin tin (a popover tin, which has larger cups, would perhaps be even better) and covering them with a wrapping of foil.

Also at a glance: the bowl in the photo doesn't look crisp enough to suit my taste. It looks a little cakey and pale, which probably makes the baked dough better suited to absorb melty ice cream. I don't especially want to eat them, though.

I am now quite keen for my planned trip to the gelateria this weekend, though. Mmmm, waffle cone.
posted by Elsa at 12:25 PM on June 18, 2009

Or, y'know, use the classic tuile method: make a thin cookie batter, bake them briefly, and while they're still hot and pliable, drape them over pre-arranged bowls or an inverted muffin tin. Why reinvent the wheel cookie bowl?
posted by Elsa at 12:27 PM on June 18, 2009 [1 favorite]

As an ice cream bowl: meh. However, as a cookie base for my as-yet-unrealized culinary dream, the chocolate chip cookie / brownie hybrid: possibly genius.

A woman at my job makes somehting like this, what she does is puts cookie dough on top of brownie batter and bakes. They are amazing.
posted by djduckie at 12:27 PM on June 18, 2009

SansPoint. You know, at the Philadelphia meetups someone (piratebowling) usually brings a baked good of some sort. We're having one this weekend. You could bring cookie bowls... just sayin...
posted by greekphilosophy at 12:57 PM on June 18, 2009

Cookie dough on brownie batter, huh? I had always envisioned it working the other way around. Perhaps I'll try that.
posted by rusty at 1:34 PM on June 18, 2009

...until someone invents a lunch gun...
posted by blueberry at 2:31 PM on June 18, 2009

Who would even think of eating anything more right after eating an entire ice cream sundae?

Disgusting fat Americans amirite Zambrano?

Those are your words, genius. It's called "self-discipline".
posted by Zambrano at 2:31 PM on June 18, 2009

greekphilosophy:

1. SHIT! That's *this* weekend?
2. I lack the equipment and time.
posted by SansPoint at 4:56 PM on June 18, 2009

"Each bowl requires two real bowls that nest, you bake the cookie/bowl inbetween them. I'm sure you all have eight pairs of oven-safe nesting bowls in your cupboard, right?"
--
"I suspect you could form these cookie bowls by draping the dough over the cups of an upside-down muffin tin (a popover tin, which has larger cups, would perhaps be even better) and covering them with a wrapping of foil. "

This was my thought. Use those large size muffin tins and you could even get two, they usually nest, and get a dozen bowls all in an easy to use package.
posted by Mitheral at 5:43 PM on June 18, 2009

I can't believe you guys found a way to complain about this. It looks delicious!

Also, a sandwich is technically an edible container.
posted by archagon at 11:31 PM on June 18, 2009

A sandwich is a motherfucking sandwich. You insult the honor of the venerable sandwich and someone is likely to take offense.

Okay, no more beating around the bush. I will straight cut you.

Oh, wait. Hmm. I guess you're right. Sandwiches ARE a container.

A CONTAINER OF AWESOME.
posted by Stunt at 1:39 AM on June 19, 2009