The Inside Scoop: How to Make Edible Cookie Dough

In the last few months, there has been an upward trend of no-bake recipes, and it's no wonder - it's getting hot. Just because the temperature is going up a few degrees, okay maybe like 10 degrees, doesn’t mean we need to sacrifice our homemade desserts.

Edible cookie dough has got to be one of the most common guilty-pleasure foods ever. Who can resist a spoonful of this sweet and sentimental comfort food? The most reckless rule-breakers among us would even go as far as eating regular raw cookie dough completely ignoring all the health risks.

So what’s the difference between the regular cookie dough we’re supposed to bake and the no-bake edible cookie dough we can dig into with a spoon straight away? The edible kind is made with no eggs and heat-treated flour, so we can safely enjoy it without any risk of developing a foodborne illness.

If you always want to sneak a taste of every batch of cookies before baking, edible cookie dough will become your new favorite dessert. And the flavor combinations are just infinite! Peanut butter, snickerdoodle, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, S’mores, brown sugar… oh my!

With all these possibilities and varieties of recipes, I still had a very big, very annoying complication keeping me from consuming the best treat ever…. Gluten allergies.

For my allergy allies, I know you know how frustrating it can be to make any meal, let alone more complex recipes. Furrowing your brows at strange replacement/alternative ingredients like psyllium husk and expandex. Why can’t we just keep it simple!? I HEAR YA! Using only pantry staples, I created the no-bake dessert that broke the internet, gluten-free edible cookie dough.

I built the base and flavor of this edible cookie dough by drawing inspiration from classic chocolate chip cookie dough recipes. I began by creaming sugar and butter and adding vanilla, and a bit of salt. With most chocolate chip recipes you would round out this base by folding in eggs, flour, and (of course!) the chocolate chips. But, I knew I wanted this cookie dough to be more than just a standard dough, and we needed to make it safe to eat raw - which meant no eggs! I added some cinnamon to bring warmth to the flavor profile.

To make cookie dough “edible,” a.k.a. totally safe to eat raw, you actually have to cook (“heat treat”) flour. Did you know that eating raw flour is just as risky as eating a raw egg? In the first rendition of this recipe, I heat treated gluten-free flour in the microwave, but in the end, the texture of that dough was off, and you could still taste the flour. As I aimed to keep this recipe allergy-friendly, I looked to other common GF flour alternatives - rice flour didn't provide enough structure, and almond flour was a bit finicky (not to mention expensive!).

I settled on a pantry staple base - oats. Oat flour could not be easier to make (just pop dry-oats in a blender and voila! Oat flour!). Another bonus: rolled or quick oats are pre-cooked and require no heat treatment. It is perfect in this dish as it adds a subtle but delicious nutty flavor.

The dough was ready, the flour was right, but what about the textures? Sure, I COULD have done a standard chocolate chip but I wanted to step it up. M & M’s? No. Chocolate-covered pretzels? Intriguing but not quite right…

And then it hit me! The ingredient that I could really sink my teeth into (and stick to my teeth too): BUTTERSCOTCH. The nutty and warm notes worked so well with the oat and cinnamon it is almost too perfect.

The layers of flavor in this simple dessert all came together in a single scoop of edible cookie dough and a small shower of sprinkles. Using pantry staples I give you this stress-free, summer-friendly, scrumptious treat.