The Tiny Cookie Experiment

If you've ever been to a video store to rent some movie you really wanted to see and then forgot what movie you went to the store to rent in the first place and then ended up getting Spider-Man 3 instead because even though you didn't like it very much when you saw it in the theater you might enjoy it a little more this time now that you don't have any high expectations, then you may have seen a particularly delicious type of candy when you walked by the snack section. The candy is called Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Bites, and you may have picked up a box knowing that they're quite delicious, but instead bought them for a slightly unusual reason. That reason might have been to bake them.

Maybe you've never been in a situation like that. Well, I have, and I thought I'd share it with you.

These are Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Bites.

(The black stuff on the box is from a melted Steak 'N' Shake bag. Long story.)

First of all, I'd like to point out the little message in the top left corner of the box. They're 10% "more free." And I think that's great. Other products should start becoming more free. Maybe that'll cause the competition to drive some things into being completely free. And that would be nice. But 10% free is pretty good too. It's apparently "more" than whatever it was before, at least.

Anyway, these things are very tasty. I've had them a few times, and I always really like them. Everybody loves cookie dough. It's a great idea for an easily accessible solution to everybody's never ending hunger for raw cookies. They're obviously just candy, and not actual cookie dough, but one day I had the brilliant idea of baking a whole batch of them just to see what would happen.

So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to bake some and...see what happens. Then I'm going to try a few. Since it's not real cookie dough, I'm not sure what it'll actually turn into. (I'm not too worried, though. It'll probably only be slightly toxic, at the most.)

Here's a side-by-side view of the ingredients in the Cookie Dough Bites compared to the ingredients for actual chocolate chip cookie dough (according to some lady).
(QUICK GAME: Try to guess which one is for the Cookie Dough Bites and which one is for real cookies!)

The Experiment

The goal here is to take Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Bites and bake them as if they're regular cookies. I'll then observe how they taste, how they look, how they feel, smell, sound, etc. (But if they're making noises, I might be a bit worried.)

Step 1: Taking Them Out of the Box

I took them out of the box.


My only gripe with these is that inside the box is this tiny bag, and inside the bag is a miniscule amount of candy that doesn't even fill the bag. It really sucks when they're the same price as Mike & Ikes and those things fill the whole box. (And are awesome, by the way.)

Step 2: Placing Them in a Pan

[Note: Take out of packaging.]

I put them in an unnecessarily large pan and separated them with enough room to expand (or melt, or explode, or whatever they're going to do).

I realized that the chocolate coating might make some sort of difference. So I left some of them the way they were and smashed all the others in case they wouldn't form a cookie shape on their own. But they didn't really smash. They kind of just crumbled. It didn't really work. Just looked like a bunch of owl turds. (I have no idea what an owl turd looks like, but apparently I think it looks like this.)

(You'll notice I was a bit lazy when it came to cleaning the pan before doing this.)

Step 3: Asking My Mother How to Use the Oven

She told me to press "bake."

Predictions

I honestly think they'll just burn. The chocolate coating will melt around them, and the "cookie dough" will burn, and they'll just taste disgusting. I doubt I'll even be able to get them off the pan.

I guess we'll see.

I just heard a beep. The oven is done pre-heating. It's time to bake.

Okay, done baking. And I must say... I'm surprised.

The Results

After pre-heating the oven to 350 degrees, I slid the pan in and left the kitchen for about five minutes. When I walked back into the kitchen to take them out, I was hit by a smell. But it wasn't a bad smell. It smelled like...cookies. They actually smelled like cookies! I was amazed. Not only did they smell like cookies, they smelled like good cookies. In fact, they smelled really good!

Suddenly I had very high hopes. I didn't expect them to smell good at all. I expected them to smell like burnt molasses if anything. I thought, "If they smell good, they must taste good." I began to get my hopes up. And, to my surprise, not in vain.

They tasted...pretty good. As far as my standards for real chocolate chip cookies go, I wouldn't consider them very great. But I definitely wouldn't consider them that bad.

They certainly didn't taste as bad as they looked. Clearly none of them got anywhere close to a cookie shape. My efforts of smashing some of them into the correct shape yielded crappy results. What ended up happening was the chocolate coating simply kept them in the same shape as they were before I put them in the oven. (So some were vaguely round, and others were vaguely owl turds.)

The "cookies" definitely didn't have a normal cookie texture. They were crispy and hard, and (as I suspected) pretty well stuck to the pan. Some of them were easy to get into my hands, but others will take some long-term scraping efforts. They turned out like the little blobs of dough that somehow separate from a ball of cookie dough from time to time when you bake cookies. The little blobs bake quickly and become crispy. They don't taste bad, but they don't taste like their bigger cookie siblings. That's the best comparison I can offer.

I'm really surprised. I thought they would be horrible. They're really not bad at all. In fact, I've been munching on them while writing this. I'm really quite pleased.

I don't really know what I was expecting of it, but the experiment was a complete success. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Bites wear their name proud; they truly are cookie dough. Although they're better in their regular form, it is now known that baking them yields slightly delicious results.

Official Conclusion

They were actually fairly good.

And Spider-Man 3 still really sucks.