Birthday Biz - Celebrating #13!

It's not every day someone turns 13, and birthdays are the best time to try all kinds of new celebratory desserts. We usually end up celebrating an extra time or two so that we include friends and family in the fun.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cake was the official birthday cake of choice this year. My new teenager is a big fan of both cookie dough and cookies and cream, so her choice was tough, but eventually she chose the cookie dough route. It turns out to be a pretty tasty path. 😄

There a several steps to the recipe, so allow plenty of time. I made the cakes (using regular instant vanilla pudding) and froze them a few days ahead of time. The day of I made the cookie dough and then finally the frosting. Be sure to leave time for the cookie dough to freeze! I missed that step when I first read through the recipe, and almost didn't have enough time. My suggestion for the middle layer would be to frost with a thin layer of the butter cream, then add the cookie dough pieces on top. The cookie dough and the frosting don't mix together terribly well, and it's an even bigger disaster to try and spread it. One other suggestion if you end up doing nine inch layers as I did--make more than the eight cookies. I would suggest 12 or so. There's more than enough cookie dough for that to happen.  In fact, I still have 23-30 cookie dough balls left in the freezer.

This cake was amazing. The frosting would be fantastic on a chocolate cake or anywhere you want the flavor of cookie dough. It is incredibly sweet, but sooooooooo good.

For the actual birthday day, we celebrated with chocolate lava cakes. They were slightly more lava than cake (so use err to the longer side of the cooking time), but they were lovely. I also found them to be easier than I expected, which was nice after a long day in the classroom. I used regular butter instead of the alternative listed in the recipe, and had enough batter for four fairly full ramekins.

Both of the desserts are completely birthday worthy. I just realized in writing this post that not once did we light birthday candles. I forgot with the lava cakes, and we ate the cookie dough cake away from home. Mom fail? Oh well, we sang, so that's what is important right? No matter what, we celebrated with plenty of sweets, and she knows she's loved. Maybe we will light candles twice next year.