Story by: Kiara Wisniewski. As someone who loves to bake, the holiday season is my favorite. This year, I wanted a quick, no stress cookie recipe. It was easy for me to decide on cookies since I can easily put them in a ziploc bag without worrying about them getting mushy, like with brownies. The only problem, though, was that I wanted a cookie like no other—one that was substantial and more flavorful than the average cookie.

Finding a Recipe

Since I love baking, I already had many recipes at my disposal—maybe too many. This made my search a little easier but led to hours of googling, looking on pinterest, and looking at my own recipes, until I found two very similar recipe cards; however, they weren’t exactly for cookies. What were they for, you ask? Cookie cups. Something I hadn’t thought of, and way better than my original idea for cookies. Cookie cups are the more creative, distant relative of cupcakes, but still much like a regular cookie. After settling on what to make and a recipe for how to make it, I just had to get the ingredients needed.

Where to Shop

Since I wanted to stay fairly local (the farthest I would go was Hornell), I had limited options. Using my resources (mostly google, but some personal knowledge, too) I figured out if each store had all the ingredients and minimized my stores from five to just two:Wegmans and Aldi. Now it was just a matter of where I wanted to go. I ended up choosing Aldi—mostly so I could check their new renovations out.

The Process

I made the cookie cups with the peanut butter cups first, because I only had one cupcake pan, and I could save time by making the dough for the other cookie cups while these were in the oven. This worked well, but I had to wait for the pan to completely cool from the first set of cookie cups before I could start the process of adding cupcake liners to the pan.

Once I had put the caramel cookie cup batch in the oven, I realized that I had enough dough and toppings to make 2 more full batches of each. It was at this point in my process that I decided to mix things up. I used the uncooked dough and toppings to create 4 different types of cookies—the two original cookie cup types, and then two with reversed toppings (the homemade dough with peanut butter cups, and the premade dough with caramel). This was a simple change, and all of the cookie cups turned out delicious.

Taste Testing

Once I made the cookie cups, I used my friends, and their parents, as taste testing guinea pigs. Julian Petrillo, junior, gave me thorough feedback that visually the original cookie cups (the chocolate chip batter with peanut butter cups, and the homemade batter with caramel) looked better. Petrillo’s visual observations matched his taste findings, as he ranked the original pairings to be the top options, with the peanut butter cup infirst. His analysis was that the caramel with the chocolate chip batter (ranked fourth) wasn’t nearly as good as the rest because the caramel overpowered the chocolate chips, and the peanut butter cup with homemade batter was a bit bland. Lucian Fioretto, junior, gave a similar analysis. He had the same ranking as Petrillo, and also added that the chocolate chip batter was a little too salty for his liking. To sum it up, the homemade dough seemed softer, puffier, and more moist compared to the denser, saltier store-bought dough. Although my dough was less sweet on its own, when combined with the sweet toppings of caramel and peanut butter cups, it resulted in a much fuller flavor, without being overpowering. Another response I was given was that the homemade dough was “way more natural feeling,” and without knowledge of the dough differences, could’ve been picked out as the homemade one. With results like this, I’m satisfied with my recipes, and will definitely be making more cookie cups, and I hope you do as well.