Bake A Giant Cookie of Love
This is the first in a RED Hearts series of spring-into-summer recipes—things you can cook or bake, usually healthy things, always easy things—for the people you heart. Served up by Erika Kwee, 23, “the baker, photographer and typo-maker” behind vegetarian food blog The Pancake Princess
Little brothers can often be annoying little buggers. But chalk this one up as a win for the buggers because I’m totally stealing this idea from my brother!
After becoming fascinated by the gooey deep-dish pizza-cookies, or “pizookies” from a certain chain restaurant, my brother started baking up overgrown cookie cakes of his own and hauling them to school in pizza boxes to honor his friends’ birthdays. (Nice kid, right?) He got so into it, and they were so well received, he’s set up a little online bakery business.
The best part of this pizookie business—aside from the fact that you, you know, get to share a giant cookie with people you like—is the personalization factor. My brother has spent many an hour decorating pizookies with everything from volleyballs and tennis balls to a Hunger Games mockingjay in chocolate and the deathly hallows logo from Harry Potter.
You can order these from him, but as with most things in life, they’re so much better if you make them yourself. All sorts of cool stencils can be found on Pinterest, but you can definitely just let your imagination run wild.
Here’s how you do it:
Bake up your favorite chocolate chip cookies in an 8- or 9-inch cake pan (a recipe that usually yields 12-15 cookies works great for this! I love halving this one. Let the pizookie cool completely.
Cut your desired stencil out of paper, place it over your pizookie and sprinkle on powdered sugar! Make sure to smear the powdered sugar around the edges of the stencil a bit so that the lines come out looking crisp.
I filled in the “cut outs” on this Sweet 16 pizookie with an easy glaze of powdered sugar and milk topped with rainbow sprinkles, but you can leave them blank. For those with advanced decorating skills, the possibilities are endless. Among them is the deliciousness of melting down chocolate chips and drizzling designs onto wax paper (place a picture underneath the wax paper if you want a guide to follow—hello Divergent logos!). Let the chocolate cool completely before peeling it off and placing it on the pizookie.
Have fun. Experiment. Maybe even show my little bugger of a brother how it’s done…