Very special treat day!

Yesterday, I alluded to baking for the Weekly Wednesday treat day, but I couldn't talk about it yet as I needed to wait until this morning to finish assembling it. Today is Jeff's birthday, which just happens to fall on a Wednesday this year, so we had to make this treat extra special for him to share!

For his past birthdays, I've always done some sort of an untraditional cake - here is one cake I made a couple years ago. This Mickey cake came about as Jeff is a Disney fanatic.

Last year's cake was really just an experiment of sorts - it was a rich Devil's Food Cake with a ring of homemade Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream hidden inside and then frosted with a peppermint spiked Swiss Meringue. I placed it under the broiler for a minute or so to brown the meringue spikes.

We kept with the untraditional theme this year and I made a Giant Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake! This cake is 5 souped-up cookies layered with a cream cheese mixture that has been very lightly sweetened with confectioners' sugar.

While I was gathering the ingredients yesterday, I was a little nervous as I was reading through the ingredient list as something didn't seem right. I read over this recipe a few times in the past couple of weeks, but it didn't hit me until then that the recipe only called for 6 tablespoons of softened butter to be creamed until "light and fluffy" with just over 2 cups of sugar. Good luck with that happening I thought! I sat down and read through the whole recipe again and figured that the missing fat from the butter would be added back in from heavy cream later on, but I still didn't get how the butter and sugar were suppose to cream together. Guess what, it doesn't! I went ahead anyway and it finally began to look like cookie dough as soon as I got the eggs in.

Once the cookie dough is ready, you smear 5 large rounds of dough onto parchment paper and bake one at a time until the disks are deeply golden around the edges and just slightly browned in the middle. You want to make sure they are cooked enough so they will hold together - they can be a little on the dry side if needed as the cookies will soften a bit from the filling. To make sure that the rounds are the correct size, you can trace an 8" circle on the other side of the parchment paper and use that as your guide when you spread out the dough. It should spread evenly while in the oven, but if it doesn't, you can gently reshape it with an off-set spatula halfway through baking. The dough bakes into thick and sturdy rounds that are covered with a generous amount of cream cheese whipped with confectioners' sugar.

I don't have pictures of it sliced since Jeff took it into work (and didn't save me any!), but from what I gather it went over very well! I was afraid that the whole thing might be a bit too sweet, however, the creamy richness from the filling was enough to cut the sweetness from the cookie layers. Impressive to look at, delicious from what I'm told and quite fun to make, this unique cake was just what I was looking for and I can't wait for another chance to make this again!

Recipes
Giant Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake