Count Choculade or What to Make When Life Gives You Count Chocula

Round 1: Pumpkin Spice Meets The Living Undead

Genesis

Not long after the midday sun burns off the morning fog and the Count shows up on your doorstep unexpected and unannounced. He’s face down in a loose pile of snack bars and packaging. Vampires can’t cross the threshold of your home unless you invite them in but it’s too late as you’ve already carried him into the hallway. He looks a little beat up, and bigger than you remember, but when you turn him over he assures you he’s just Family Size. Bit of a dad bod, eh Count? Despite the creases and tears through the epidermis the inner plastic seems to be unbroken, promising nearly eternal life for its contents.

You had ordered the snack bars (Larabars) over the weekend and they arrived unnaturally quickly, heralded by an advance scout: a mysterious single bar, shipped separately in its lonely corrugated sarcophagus. Despite his clear absence anywhere in your receipt or manifest it’s likely noone else is going to welcome Count Chocula across their threshold, so you may as well eat him.

To Prepare

Start melting a stick of butter in a small pot. You keep your whole butter sticks in the freezer, so like, go eat breakfast or something.

It’s October. Grind up some allspice berries and cloves with a mortar and pestle. Add to large mixing bowl along with cinnamon, nutmeg, spelt flour, a little white flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, brown sugar, oats, and count chocula cereal. Sigh as you realize what a small percentage of the count chocula cereal you’re going to use in this recipe.

Add a little cocoa powder and some chocolate chips – You’re not 8 anymore and the Count can’t carry this chocolateyness on his own.

Add some cayenne. Now it’s basically Dia de Los Muertos Vivientes cookies. (Sorry, I don’t speak Spanish so that’s just my best guess from Google Translate. Also I mean let’s discuss appropriation vs. appreciation? Or let’s totally not. it’s cool, right? I’m just making some spicy fall cookies that may or may not be caliente.)

Go ahead, put a little splash of vanilla in there.

Something about the cereal reminds you of macarons; somehow it’s sweet, airy, and crisp, like the kind of delicate french pastry you’ll never be meticulous enough to make for yourself. Still, you wish you had some almond flour.

Add three egg whites, because that’s pretty fancy, right? This is totally how you make macarons. You feel bad separating the yolks from the outer egg encasing and if just this is already emotional labor you realize it’s a good thing you don’t work as a school bus driver taking children farther from their parents all morning. It’s worth it because this is how fancy people cook. Egg Whites!

You feel sufficiently guilty about wasting food that the second two yolks go into the pan you used to melt butter and back over the heat to fry. You’ll eat them later as a snack, while asking yourself if this is a mistake from a cholesterol point of view until you remember that you’re baking with a whole stick of butter and that’s surely the greater sin.

Mix into a batter, plop onto parchment paper, top with a few pieces of Count Chocula cereal, and bake for approximately 21 minutes.

Review

• 7/10 stars. Especially when fresh they’re a really nice blend of salty, sweet, pumpkin-spice, chocolate, actual spice-heat from the cayenne,… What I’m saying is that butter, sugar, and a lack of greivous missteps results in pretty good cookies though, and the fall-spice thing doesn’t hurt at all. A little too chewy, especially after the first few hours. The count-chocula texture on the outside is nice, and visually appealing.

• “ooh, spicey” – Vaughnda. She didn’t have much to say but she ate plenty of them.

Round 2: Count Chocul’range

Genesis

You still have a lot Count Chocula. Also the CSA sent you like 6 oranges this week.

Speaking of people sending you things, Jess sent you cocoa powder with a note expressing some brand loyalty. Your old cocoa powder comes in packaging extolling its health values and the condition of the workers who prepared it (probably still miserable, let’s be honest, fair trade). It is the color of chocolate milk. Your new cocoa powder is Extra Brute and pours out the color of espresso. It’s ground so finely that you’re certain it’s known to the state of California to cause lung cancer. The flavor is exquisite, and the bag politely recommends that you post to social media.

While we’re on the topic of things Jess sent you one time, let’s also talk about about Tonka beans. Actually, you can google that shit for yourself, but I’ll just tell you they’re illegal and delicious.

To Prepare

Grate some nutmeg and about 1/4 of a tonka bean over some butter as you start to soften it in a small sauce pan. Convince your wife to zest most of two oranges into the pan while you refuse to measure the dry ingredients.

Pour whole wheat flour, almond flour, brown sugar, in vaguely equal amounts, into a bowl. Add salt, baking soda, baking powder, cocoa, and a little cinnamon. Note: Cinnamon is helpful in that it actually lowers the glycemic index of sugary foods, but harmful in that it has the same liver toxin as Tonka beans, so it might be slightly foolish to use large amounts of tonka beans and cinnamon in the same recipe? I dunno but let’s just put a dash of cinnamon in here and blend all the dry ingredients together.

Add three egg whites and one egg. It might’ve been four egg whites if we’re being honest, but you did a bad job cracking one of the eggs. Briefly consider making an aoili but callously throw the egg yolks in the trash; you have the hardened heart of a true baker and feeding it cholesterol will only shorten your illustrious career.

A dash of vanilla, wait for the butter to cool down a little, and mix everything into a batter.

Oh wait, add a bunch of Count Chocula cereal and some chocolate chips.

The whole problem here is that you have way too goddamned much Count Chocula, so this time we’re going for chocula encrusted cookies.

Roll the dough into a rough ball and then dredge or pat it around in some count chocula. You can use the butter pan to hold the count, since it still has a little butter you might get out as well.

These cookies come out plump. If they were a cat they might be politely described as Chonkers. Chonks? I mean who even does that anymore? You can only fit a dozen of them on the baking tray but you still have more dough, so just wad up some parchment paper at the bottom of a small loaf pan and pour the rest in.

Bake at 350 for 28 minutes, rotating the baking tray halfway through because the back of your oven is way hotter than the front. Should they be rising more? Is it the almond flour? But all those eggs? Is baking a precision craft after all?

Reviews

• 7/10 stars. The dough baked well but the texture problem is really the Count Chocula cereal itself. On the inside of the cookie it gets damp and somehow slightly stale textured. The outside is victorious and crisp while they’re fresh, but gets stale the next day. If anything you could’ve baked them a minute or two less.

• with the almond flour, orange, tonka bean, and Brute Strength of Jess’s cocoa, it’s a delicious cookie that could only be improved by the exclusion of these sugared-up blood-sucking cheerios.

• “they look fun. they just look fun. […] I love the orange with it. This is the superior version. and the cereal is still crunchy which is really nice. I just love that you can see the ghosts. It’s so cute! I don’t know if it’s my imagination but you can almost tell it’s a fancier cocoa? It’s rich but light at the same time which is kind of a great trick? I don’t know how you did that” almond flour and egg whites “oh, yeah that’ll do it. yeah that’s totally it.”

In conclusion I would recommend cookies with Count Chocula on top (and never mixed in) for a party or occasion when they’d all be eaten promptly, while still fresh and crispy, so optimisticall this is an idea to revisit in 2022 after the novelty of having more then four people in the same room wears off and novelty baked goods would help rekindle the magic once again.

Round 3

Enough of this “baking with it” bullshit just eat it with some kind of liquid in a bowl like how god intended.

Reviews

• if you use water as the liquid you should really wait a few minutes for the marshmellows to melt, and then it’s more like a cheap watered down chocolate sauce.

• pretty good with that “oat creamer” shit your wife has been buying lately, or i mean, better than with just water anyhow.

• I didn’t try it with milk who even just has milk sitting around like they’re some kind of elementary school cafeteria or something?

• “And that’s why I don’t have enough creamer for the week.” – Vaughnda