mindspew.blog

On a militant re-binge of The Walking Dead and was reminded of Carol Peletier’s post-apoc child traumatising bribery cookies from season 5 and thought, “Hot damn, I wanna make some post-apoc child traumatising bribery cookies too!”.
Turns out AMC did actually release a recipe, so that saved a considerable amount of ball ache;

Ingredients:

1/4 cup applesauce
1/4 large chocolate bar (about 45-50g)
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup shortening or butter (about 57g)
1 cup flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

1. Preheat over to 350°F (175°C)
2. In a large bowl, combine applesauce, shortening, brown sugar and white sugar. Mix until shortening is blended.
3. Add baking powder, baking soda, flour, salt and vanilla. Mix until doughy and flour is fully absorbed.
4. Let dough sit for 3 – 5 minutes.
5. Melt chocolate (for best results use a double-boiler method).
6. Add chocolate to dough and mix until fully blended.
7. Place golf ball sized dollops of dough about 2 inches apart on non-stick cookie sheets.
8. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 11-13 minutes.
9. Remove from oven and leave on cookie sheet to cool before eating.
10. Traumatize a child.*

*DO NOT traumatize a child.

Being a deviant I did deviate from the recipe slightly, the shortening I ordered with my groceries didn’t show up and dammit I wanted to make ’em today so I substituted with butter (Alexandria briefly had a cow and a butter churn but they cut the scenes where we see it. True story, shut up, don’t fact check me.), which may have made them a bit softer than shortening would have but I’m not mad about it cuz I dig softer cookies. The other alteration might be the applesauce, I say “might” because all the applesauce I ever encountered stateside was smooth, and all applesauce I’ve had in the UK is chunky lol, and nowhere did I find a stipulation so these were made with the chunky, albeit sternly pummeled variety. The chocolate wasn’t so much a deviation but of course American chocolate can differ vastly from UK/EU chocolate. I didn’t try to find anything similar to Hershey’s because let’s be real no one else is trying to make that, and ended up opting for Galaxy as it’s artificial tasting enough whilst still being enjoyable; that’ll do.

The cat was unexpectedly hyped about the dough so my attempt at capturing some aesthetic ball action was violently thwarted..

The most time consuming part of the whole mission was mixing the wet ingredients and sugar, likely exacerbated by the apple chunks I was trying to squish (I own no blendy mixy tech beyond what god gave me), in other words these are both crazy simple AND quick as hell to make, and honestly the recipe is mostly sugar four ways in a lard emulsion, so basically it checks off all the boxes for what you’d want in a zombie apocalypse treat.

As for the results, honestly really nice! Lovely balance of crispy and soft, I expected the chocolate to come through quite strongly but it’s actually extremely subtle and same goes for the apple, I can’t say I taste any apple flavour but there is something there that my mouth isn’t registering as basic cookie lol, it’s like it teams up with the vanilla to soften the edge of all the sugar and fools you into thinking you can eat them all in one go and not feel slightly judgemental about it afterwards.
8/10, would totally keep shtum about Carol stealing guns and then agonisingly perish in a poncho of guts for ’em.

To quote my neighbor: “Yeah decent thanks man”

Edit: I have no idea why it keeps keeps aligning all the text in the middle when I keep telling it to go left…..bear with lol, wordpress has gotten way sillier since I last used it..