Culturess SugarBomb FreakShake

The Recipe

Since this FreakShake is a celebration of the site, I toyed with a color theme of purple from the Culturess logo. When I saw a recipe for Blueberry Muffin Top Cookies, I knew I had the perfect baked good for the job and decided to go with the purple fruity theme. Because fruit makes it healthy, right?

Blueberry Muffin Top Cookies

(Adapted from My Baking Addiction
Makes about 2 dozen cookies)

Ingredients

Streusel
3/4 cup all-purpose flour (swap up to 1/4 cup for almond flour)
¼ cup light brown sugar
¼ cup granulated sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons unsalted butter

Dough
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
Plus
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract or emulsion
2 tablespoons lemon zest
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon lemon extract
2 large eggs, room temperature
1 ½ cups frozen or rinsed & dried fresh blueberries

Glaze
1 cup powdered sugar
Plus:
1 tablespoon lemon juice plus extra
1 teaspoon lemon zest
½ teaspoon almond extract
pinch of salt

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F and line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.
2. Prepare the streusel by mixing together all streusel ingredients in a small bowl using a pastry blender. You can also use a fork. When you get little chunks of streusel with sandy mixed bits, put the bowl into the fridge while you make the dough.
3. To make the dough, mix together the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda in a medium bowl.
4. In a stand mixer with paddle attachment or in a large bowl with a hand mixer, cream the butter and sugar at medium speed until light and fluffy.
5. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the lemon zest, lemon juice, vanilla extract, almond extract, and lemon extract.
6. Scrape down the sides of the bowl again and add the eggs one at a time and mix thoroughly. Due to the lemon ingredients, the mixture will look a little curdled.
7. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and mix on low until barely combined into dough. The dough will be quite thick.
8. Find that your stand mixer’s head won’t unlock to tilt up and try not to panic as you carefully use a spatula to move your dough into another bowl. Skip this step if you aren’t me and do not have a mixer crisis.
9. Add the blueberries to your dough. If they are frozen blueberries, immediately mix into the dough by gently using a spatula while trying to not squish thawing berries or rip their skins off. Your dough will be a bit stiffer because of cooling from the frozen blueberries. For fresh blueberries, gently mix into the dough by hand. When I say mix by hand, I mean actually using your hands. Fresh blueberries are delicate and you want to try to not squash them into a million purple-blue smears in your dough.
10. Take the streusel out of the fridge and break it up with a fork. Scoop the dough into 2″ balls (I used a Oxo medium cookie scoop) and roll each ball in the streusel. The bottom doesn’t need any, but rolling the whole thing makes it slightly easier to handle because this is a messy process. The streusel won’t stick really well to the ball, so pat additional streusel onto the top and sides of your ball.
11. Place on the prepared cookie sheet about 3″ apart. Streusel that falls off the ball will be engulfed as the cookie spreads out. My cookies spread out to almost 3½ inches in diameter, so don’t try to squeeze too many onto the cookie sheet.
12. Bake for about 15 minutes until the edges are lightly browned on the edges. You can test the middle of a cookie with a toothpick to see if it comes out clean, like cake.
13. Cool for 5 minutes on the cookie sheet and then finish cooling cookies on a wire rack.
14. When the cookies are completely cooled, make the glaze. In a small bowl add the powdered sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, almond extract, and pinch of salt. Mix together and add more lemon juice if the mixture is too thick for a glaze. You’re looking for a texture that will hold its shape, but not be too thick to drizzle over the cookies.
15. Drizzle glaze over the cookies with a spoon or put the glaze into a plastic sandwich bag, snip the corner, and squeeze to drizzle over the cookies. Let glaze dry completely.
16. The cookies will keep longest in the refrigerator, for up to 5 days. You can also plastic wrap individual cookies and add into a large zip bag to freeze.

What about the milkshake?

While I make great homemade ice cream, my freezer is currently like a packed music festival with fans overflowing and smashing my toes when I open the door, so freezing the ice cream maker canister was out of the question. Luckily there are lots of great options at the grocery store and I settled on the lovely purple Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip Gelato from Talenti.

Pâtissez makes their milkshakes using frozen milk to get the thick texture they want with less ice cream, so freeze some milk ahead of time in an ice cube tray if you want to mimic this. The milkshake thickness will depend on how thick you like it. For a thick one, the ratio is about 1/4 cup milk to 1 cup ice cream. If you use frozen milk, that will make it thicker. Make sure it’s thick enough to support your toppings, otherwise there will be a reenactment of the Titanic in your shake assembly. You’ll also need to make sure you have enough milkshake ingredients to fill your glass(es).

Let’s Talk Sauce!

Every great FreakShake has at least one sauce, so I made some blueberry sauce to support the cookie flavor. A white chocolate ganache (white chocolate and cream, google recipes and pick one) would also go well alone or in conjunction with blueberry sauce. I ran out of time to add this due to my mixer indigent during the cookie baking portion.

Quick Blueberry Sauce

Ingredients
2 cups of frozen blueberries, from the bag that falls on your feet when you open the door
5 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon tapioca or corn starch dissolved in 2 tablespoons water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

1. Put the blueberries into a saucepan with enough water to almost cover the berries and add the sugar. Cook over medium heat until it reaches a simmer.
2. Add your starch slurry and vanilla and cook until thickened to desired consistency. You want it to be thick enough that it will be able to cling to the sides of your glass without being completely washed away when you pour in the milkshake, but thin enough that the sauce is still pourable. If it gets too thick, add water in by the teaspoon to thin. Let the sauce cool in the fridge.

Because the shakes are of stacked construction, I decided to stabilize my whipped cream for a more supportive texture. This can be done using various methods including cornstarch, powdered sugar (it usually contains cornstarch to stop the sugar from clumping), gelatin, mascapone, creme frâiche, or commercial stabilizers like Dr. Oetker Whip it! I happened to have gelatin, so I went with that, but you should pick what you have access to. Also if you don’t want to make your own, spray whipping cream from the dairy sections can work well enough.

Extra toppings are part of the fun. I found some purple sparkling sugar at a HomeGoods store in the random foods section, a great place to discover fun items. The grocery store bulk foods aisle let me practice my scooper skills when I picked out a few purple butterflies from the colorful gummy butterfly bin. I also considered purplish yogurt covered pretzels, but decided something like that needs a ganache to use as glue on the glass.

Bringing It All Together

After you’ve gotten together some friends with mugs and all the FreakShake components, blender or food processor (works well for really thick textured shakes) your milkshake mixture. The fun is that every shake can be an individual sugarbomb expression of food creativity. Start by putting your mug on a plate to catch the drips because there will be drips and oozing if you do it right.

I went with a layer of sauce dripped to the bottom down the sides. Then I added the milkshake. Then I topped with chunks of cookie, more sauce, whipped cream piped on from a pastry bag. (Dollops from a spoon work fine too.) Tuck in a cookie on the side, top with a few butterflies, some sparkly purple sugar, plus a straw. This is not a drink for those on a diet. In fact, I’m not sure it’s really a drink. (The straw was mostly decorative – blueberries and chunks of cookie don’t fit.)

In conclusion, I would have gotten more ice cream and frozen the milk to get a stronger, thicker milkshake base. That way a higher pile of whipped cream could be supported above the top of the glass. I will also note that you should plan to be unable to eat or function well for several hours afterward. Fluff your pillow for the post-sugar food coma. Everyone was happy with their creations. A little dessert chaos in a cup looks great, as FreakShakes are meant to be a bit of a mess.

So go wild and crazy! Follow my recipe, or make your own inspired combination. The expected mess and the fun would work great with kids. (Just maybe do it outdoors, so you can hose off the children afterwards.) For adult versions, you could incorporate a little liqueur into the whipped cream, sauce, and even milkshake components.

Next: Check out more Food from Culturess

Tell us about your mad scientisted up creations or pondered Sugarbomb creations in the comments!