I Made the Viral Dot Cake as Cookies

You've probably heard about the viral dot cakes that are swooping the internet right now. Let's take that concept and turn it into an incredible gourmet dot cake cookie that everybody is going to love. Let's start with our butter. You'll need one cup of softened unsalted butter. Drop that right in a large mixing bowl. We will add 3 1⁄4 cup of granulated sugar along with 1 1⁄4 cup of firmly packed light brown sugar. I can get it out of my measuring cup. For this recipe, you can either use your stand mixer or you can use an electric hand mixer. Today, I'm just using an electric hand mixer. Either way, you're going to beat these ingredients together until they're light and fluffy and well-creamed. Next, we're adding two tablespoons of a neutral cooking oil. Avocado, canola, vegetable oil, any of these will work. You won't find oil added to too many cookie recipes, but for this version, I wanted to lean into cake territory without making the cookie super dry and cakey. This oil really makes a nice, soft, tender crumb that works well as a cookie version of the dot cake. We're also going to add some eggs. We'll add two large eggs. And if you've been watching me for any amount of time, you know I'm always super late on trends. I don't usually do any trends, but I've had a lot of people asking me to do something with the dot cakes. And honestly, they're so easy. It's just such a simple concept that I couldn't help myself and I really love these. Followed by two teaspoons of vanilla extract. We want a nice, healthy pour of vanilla. Vanilla adds a lot of depth. It also enhances the sweetness. And these are a sweeter cookie because again, cake. We are emulating cake here. Set this aside and we'll give everything a nice quick stir on low speed just to get all of the ingredients well incorporated. Anytime we're mixing our ingredients together, especially wet ingredients like these, we want to pause, scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl because we want a nice uniform mixture before we start adding our dry ingredients. It's pretty good. I think it needs one more quick stir. Slide this out of the way for just a minute. We'll need a separate bowl for our dry ingredients. And the first dry ingredient we need is cake flour. Once again, I really wanted to lean into the cakey territory here. Cake flour works really, really well. I will include a note if you don't have cake flour on how to use all-purpose, but just a really important note is that cake flour is a lot finer than all-purpose flour, so it's not a straight cup for cup substitution. Add that to our bowl. We are also going to add one and a half teaspoons of baking powder, 3 1⁄4 teaspoon of baking soda, and 3 1⁄4 teaspoon of table salt. A nice 3 1⁄4 teaspoon. Measure together. Go ahead and whisk everything together. We want our baking powder, our baking soda, and our salt nicely and evenly distributed into the dry ingredients. Now we'll just gradually add this into our wet ingredients. I usually do this in like four parts. You don't want to add too much flour at one time because the dough can become really dry and just difficult for it to absorb all of that flour. So just low speed or medium speed until just combined, and then we'll add the next bit. Part three, your final bit of flour. All right, and we are going to pause, scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl again just to make sure all of that flour is nicely combined into our dough. Looking pretty good here. Now comes the hardest part of the whole recipe is the chilling time. This dough does need to chill for 30 minutes before you can bake it. So we're just going to cover it with plastic wrap and we will pop it in the fridge. And once it's nearly done chilling, or really at any point in that 30 minutes, you will want to get your oven preheating to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. All right, once our dough is finished chilling, it's time to scoop and bake. Uncover it first, it's important. So I scoop these cookies to be about two tablespoons in size. If you're looking for a gram measurement, that's 38 grams. After scooping, I roll them into a nice smooth ball between my palms, and we are going to space these cookies at least two inches apart on the baking sheet. We are going to transfer these to the center rack of our preheated oven. They're going to need to bake for about 10 minutes. All right, when we pull these out of the oven, you're going to notice they're pretty ball shaped. That's normal. Immediately, or within a minute of them coming out of the oven, you want to grab something with a nice flat bottom surface, clean as well. I like to use a one cup measuring cup. We're going to gently flatten each cookie. Be gentle, but you want to give it a nice flat surface because that's where we're going to put our icing. Now, the first batch of cookies, you always want to pay close attention to. That way you can judge how much your subsequent batches need to bake or how long they need to bake in your oven. We're going to let these cool a couple minutes before we put any of our cookies in, and then we'll carefully look underneath. You want the bottoms to be very, very lightly golden. If they're super golden, they baked a little bit too much, they'll be a little bit dry. This looks pretty much perfect. I could even potentially go a little bit lighter. Too light, though, when they're going to kind of break when you dip them in the nonpareils. We're going to let these cookies cool a bit, and in the meantime, I will prepare our frosting. Again, I'm going to be using my electric hand mixer to make this, but you could make it in your stand mixer with the paddle attachment instead if you prefer. We're making a simple and really tasty vanilla frosting, and it starts with one cup of softened salted butter. If you only have unsalted butter, you're just going to add a pinch of salt in with it, but for a lot of frosting recipes, I've really been opting for salted butter recently. So that's what we're using today. Before I start adding the sugar, I'm just going to beat this with my mixer until it's smooth and creamy. This will make incorporating the rest of the ingredients a little bit easier. And then I have here measured out four cups of powdered sugar. I'm just going to add about a cup of the sugar to start. Grab a little scoop to make that easier. We're also going to add a nice, generous pour of vanilla extract as well. We're adding two teaspoons of vanilla, and we'll just stir in this sugar. Once it's absorbed, we'll continue to add the sugar until we've added all of it. Let's add the rest. All right, last ingredient. I have some heavy cream here. This is four tablespoons of heavy cream. If you don't have heavy cream, you could use milk, though you're probably going to need a little bit less milk than you would cream just because it's thinner. So we're going to add this one tablespoon at a time, about one tablespoon at a time. We'll just beat this until it's nice and smooth. All right, let's grab a spatula and take a look at this. This should be smooth and spreadable, nice and creamy. Now do not pipe this on your cookies until your cookies have cooled completely. Otherwise they could break, the frosting could melt, it could just get messy. We're also going to want to prep our nonpareils. This is 3 4ths cup of nonpareils. Just want them in a kind of wide dish. That way we can dip our cookies in them. All right, once your cookies are nice and cool, we're just going to decorate these. And this is super easy. You're going to dollop one and a half tablespoons of frosting per cookie. You can do that however you like, but I like to use my one and a half tablespoon cookie scoop. Just makes it nice and easy. So we just dollop that on. Then I use an offset spatula just to kind of spread it nice and smooth. Nice even layer on top. And then we'll pick up a cookie, hold it firmly by the base, and just dip it in the nonpareils. That's really it. That's all there is to making the viral dot cake into a dot cake cookie. I really love these, and personally, I think they're better than the dot cakes. You may have noticed, I haven't been posting quite as many videos recently, and that's because I've been working nonstop behind the scenes on finalizing my cookbook. I will try to remember to leave a link so you can either pre-order it if that's ready, or you can be notified once the cookbook is available for pre-order. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you next time. All right, the best part of the day. Soft cake, creamy icing, crunchy sprinkles. Like I get, I get why it's popular. It's so easy. We're going to be starting with. Sorry, let me do that again. Sometimes I panic. How's that?