The Sweetest Kitchen

Members of Costco look forward to their monthly coupon booklet, and if other members are like me, they get super excited when there’s a coupon for something from the bakery!  Imagine how I felt when I saw a $2 coupon for Costco’s “gourmet chocolate chunk cookies” this month!

The cookies came in a pack of 24.  After taste-testing one, I froze the rest of them to make them last as long as possible.  The cookies are absolutely fanastic.  They are soft and chewy, and the chocolate chunks are huge and delicious.

But with 24 of these cookies, I wanted to try to do some more creative things with them, rather than just eat them as is, one by one.  So first I made an ice cream sandwich.

Which was great, but two of those huge cookies, plus vanilla ice cream, plus mini chocolate chips was a bit too much to eat all at once!

Next, after being inspired by a post from Our Best Bites about frozen pudding pops, I made vanilla pudding pops (using half and half) with chunks of Costco’s cookies and ribbons of fudge sauce.

Okay, so that fudge sauce really didn’t work out very well!  It gets solid in the refrigerator, so I thought it would freeze up solid in the freezer, but the warm water I need to use to unmold the pops melted the fudge sauce.  Despite the horrible messy look to these pudding pops, however, they tasted amazing!

You might think that the chunks of cookie that went into these pops would freeze up too hard to bite into, but you’d be wrong.  The pudding actually kept the cookie pieces soft and easy to bite into.

My last creative adventure for Costco’s cookies was simply a chocolate chip cookie sundae.

I warmed the cookie in the microwave until it was really soft and the chunks were really gooey, scooped vanilla ice cream on top, as well as fudge sauce and a cherry.

But most of the cookies actually got eaten plain!  I had stored in them in the freezer, but let them thaw out completely to room temperature before eating them.  A quick zap in the microwave once they were at room temperature made them taste like they had just come from the oven.  My crazy daughter preferred to eat them straight from the freezer!

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On a totally separate note, I’d like to say that I’m now 37 weeks pregnant.  I have a habit of going early with my pregnancies, so anytime from now if you notice that I haven’t posted in over 4 days it would probably be safe to assume that the baby has arrived!  I may take a brief hiatus from updating The Sweetest Kitchen for a few weeks after that, although I have a few other recipes currently waiting to be posted that I will try to go through first.  Don’t worry though, because I will return!  :)