I’m twenty nine years old.  I’m an adult.  I pay my bills.  I do my taxes.  I go to jury duty.  I stand in line at the post office without heavy sighs.  I floss too!  I totally floss.

And yet.  Somehow.  I thought it would be ok… not just ok, but reasonable… not just reasonable… but a good idea to make chocolate chip cookie dough, freeze it and then dip the balls in melted chocolate.

Now I have a  freezer full of giant cookie dough balls dipped in chocolate and I’m panicking.  I need an adult.  I’m about to eat cookie dough for lunch, cookie dough for dinner, cookie dough for dessert, and then cookie dough again for second dinner.

Incidentally, if the blatant consumption of raw sugar and butter offends your sensibilities, perhaps you might be better suited with these Blueberry Applesauce Muffins or Low Fat Oatmeal Banana Bread.  And you’ll have to accept my sincere apologies for the ridiculousness of frozen cookie. and chocolate.  together.  forever.

Raw cookie dough.  Sooo dang good.

Now before anyone starts yelling about raw eggs and poison and disease, let me assure you that this dough has no raw eggs in it.  Instead, I used Greek yogurt as the binder.  You might also use applesauce or peanut butter if you don’t have thick yogurt on hand.

Here’s how this happened.  I made eggless cookie dough, scooped it up in generous portions on a waxed paper lined cookie sheet, stuck cute plastic forks in the dough and froze those suckers overnight.  The next morning I melted down some chocolate chips, dipped the frozen dough balls and returned them to the freezer.  Serve them right from the freezer… It’s sort of the best thing ever.

Now if you’ll excuse me… I can hear someone calling my name from the freezer.  It must be these dough balls.  It would be rude not to respond.

I have this nasty little habit that shouldn’t bother you in the least… unless of course you’re one of the unlucky people in the world that might have to share a pint of ice cream with me.

See… I’m a picker.  I will shamelessly pick out every good morsel of ice cream chunky goodness from a pint, leaving only half melted ice cream for you.  Cookie Dough Ice Cream is only Cookie Dough Ice Cream until I get my paws on it for five minutes.  After a cool five minutes, that pint is just a sad excuse for vanilla ice cream.  Don’t even get me started of Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream.  I’ve got enough skills to dig out every ounce of peanut butter in seconds flat.

It’s a shameless habit.  It’s terrible and selfish… and it’ll never change.  I can’t help myself.

Cookie No-Dough Ice Cream may have just solved my ice cream picking issue.  Instead of having vanilla ice cream with chunks of cookie dough embedded within it, this ice cream… the entire ice cream is the flavor of cookie dough!  Holy heck balls!  That’s amazing.  Yea.. it is.

This ice cream is thickened with egg yolks.  Some ice creams are thickened with cornstarch.  I think egg yolks are the way to go, creating a super luscious and velvety ice cream.  The thing with thickening custards with egg yolks is that they’re very easily over cooked.  I do it all the time.  I did it with this batch of ice cream.

There’s a point after you’ve tempered the egg yolks, when you’re reheating the whole custard, stirring constantly, and you’ll test the concoction to see if it coats the back of a spoon.  Coat the back of the spoon with custard.  Run a finger down the center of the custard, and if a line remains separating the two custard halves, then your custard is thick enough.  170 degrees F is you have a nifty thermometer.

Now… if you overcook the custard, it’ll look a little grainy.  Why?  Because the egg yolks cooked.  Yikes!  Not to worry.  All is not lost.  Simply run the custard through a fine mesh strainer before cooling and freezing.  Run it through a strainer twice if you have to.  No shame in that.  Keep on trucking!

Ooooh… and this is the ice cream maker I use.  I kinda love it.