9.3.09

Shake Up The Shake

After four days of lost appetites and minimal eating due to the stomach bug going around, Julia and I finally regained some semblance of hunger and decided we both had severe cravings for chocolate milkshakes. I don't think either of us has had or even thought of having a milkshake in a year or two, but some combination of eating about 500 total calories each per day for the last half week and the unseasonably warm weather made us both a little starry-eyed for a chocolate shake.

So we went out and got some chocolate ice cream and chocolate milk. I figured a couple scoops of chocolate ice cream and half a cup of chocolate milk into our mini blender would make for a lovely-textured and flavored shake after a good minute of blending. This would be just enough to quell this odd desire for a shake but not make us totally regret it.

But somewhere between this simple result and Julia cutely requesting chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream shakes (wide-eyed: “instead?”) at the store and us forgetting to buy chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, I decided to get a little more creative to accommodate the oversight. I wanted to take the same classic shake I mentioned above and make it taste like chocolate chip cookie dough instead of just chocolate. So I added the two ingredients that I associate most closely with chocolate chip cookies – vanilla extract and brown sugar. It didn't even take very much – maybe a solid teaspoon of each into the mix before blending – but oh what a difference it made. The potentially bland chocolate milkshake suddenly had that deep richness of a chocolate chip cookie.

I didn't even think it was actually going to work. I figured the flavors would either not show up or be too garish and ruin the taste. To my delight they took perfectly to the shake but were quite noticeable, making a very strong cookie element to the flavor. Personally I loved it, and so did Julia. It made this rare splurge all the more worthwhile, with a great flavor and fun new innovation making it all the better. Of course, that great silky, thick milkshake texture didn’t go anywhere as a result of these minor additions. And we didn't even need the added raw egg, butter or flour of real cookie dough to get that awesome cookie dough flavor. It made us happy and helped to finally make us feel better. Definitely worth it, this one time.

1 comment:

Cater Hater said...

I love this post! Isn't vanill the best? I'm going to try adding vanilla extract (or a little vanilla sugar) and/or brown sugar to my milkshakes. It sounds even more decadent and divine than a milkshake already is, without adding your "auotFOODography works"!

I've added your great post to my blog post about vanilla beans and vanilla extract.

Again... great post. Thanks!