Summer's officially over in five days, and already I'm feeling nostalgic. What a fling! What a ruse! Autumn, you came so soon.
When I think back on the good ol' days, those hot summers in Fulton County, Georgia, what I remember most are the cookies 'n' cream cones my mom and I would get after her jazzercise classes. Sometimes we'd even go to the grocery store and get those huge half-gallon tubs of Breyer's Oreo ice cream, which was always the fluffiest, like sucking on air. To this day it's still my favorite ice cream flavor.
South Dakota State University claims to have invented "cookies 'n' cream." In 1979 a dairy plant manager named Shirley Seas, in an attempt to create a new flavor for the university's commercial ice cream brand, asked his dairy science students Joe Leedom and Joe Van Treeck to crush Oreo cookies into vanilla ice cream.
It's unclear who did this first—or even who owns the "cookies 'n' cream" trademark. A preliminary search in the United States Patent and Trademark Office's Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) shows that Blue Bell filed a trademark request for both "COOKIES 'N CREAM" and "COOKIES N' CREAM" on June 22, 1981, but claims to have first used it in December 1978. The request is now dead, as are some of its other variations including "COOKIES -N- CREAM."
Whoever owns it, I'm glad someone did it. It is, for me, the greatest thing to have ever happened to chocolate, cream, and the commercial dairy industry since milk chocolate.
Flash forward to years later, one late ice cream–less night, when I would recreate the classic combo in meringue cookie form. I had just finished binging all four seasons of Kenan & Kel when I had a hankering for something sweet. I stepped into my kitchen and, alas, only had Oreos in my cupboard and eggs in my fridge. I had seen Nigella Lawson make pavlova on TV once or thrice, so decided to start there.
I whipped up a standard meringue base of egg whites and sugar, a pinch of salt, then folded in about half a packet of crushed Oreos. Using an ice cream scoop (what could be more appropriate for a cookie inspired by ice cream?), I scooped out 12 or so rounds of the fluffy, black dust–flecked meringue onto a sheet pan and baked my little babies for 45 minutes or so.
Originally I had formed them like this, with craters in the middle to be filled later with piped cream and turned into mini Lawsonian pavlovas:
I would've call them pavloveos, which Tasty's Alexander Roberts helped me come up with. Other names from the peanut gallery (aka my Instagram's comments section) were:
- Oreo-lovas
- Meringueos
- Inside-out Oreos
- Dirt 'n' snow
- Cookies 'n' cream pillows
- Cookies 'n' cream clouds
- Cookies 'n' cream-puffs (my personal favorite)
Unfortunately, these never made it to the pavlova stage—as I ate all 12 of them in one sitting before I could whip the cream. No bother, though. Their distinguishing trait is their simplicity: With just three ingredients (egg whites, sugar, and Oreos), the easiest, chewiest pantry dessert is yours at the flick of a whisk.
Oh, and my Oreo-lovas (or cookies 'n' cream puffs) aren't dry and brittle like some store-bought meringues can be. They're unutterably chewy—just crisp on the outsides but pillow-soft and marshmallowy on the insides. Not unlike the best pavlova bases.
If you wanted, you could pipe out mini cookies from a pastry bag, raindrop-shaped meringues like these. Just make sure to bake them for a shorter amount of time, as they'll be smaller and more prone to brittleness.
More often than not, however, I like to go the ice cream scoop route, not least because I'm lazy (and because their chewy texture is nonpareil).
| 4 | large egg whites |
| 1 | pinch salt, optional |
| 3/4 | cup sugar |
| 18 | Oreos, finely crushed (I like to blitz them in the food processor) |
| 4 | large egg whites |
| 1 | pinch salt, optional |
| 3/4 | cup sugar |
| 18 | Oreos, finely crushed (I like to blitz them in the food processor) |
Do you love cookies 'n' cream, too? Let us know in the comments below.
Written by: Eric Kim
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9 Comments
I remember them fondly, but now Breyer's packs weigh in at a good bit less than one half gall. Plus they discontinued their brown sugar cinnamon swirl flavor, and I shall never forgive them.
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