Cookie butter is a favorite snack to eat with a spoon in our house. It was only natural I needed to make a cookie butter layer dessert. There’s a speculoos cookie crust and a cookie butter cheesecake mousse in this recipe, what more would you want?
I’m not near a Trader Joe’s to get a weekly dose of cookie butter. No one really knows about it in my little town. I rave about it because it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever tasted that comes from a jar. I always get questions like, “what is cookie butter?” or “what is IN cookie butter?”
Good question, friends.
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What is cookie butter?
It’s similar to a nut butter but it’s made of cookies! No, it’s not good for you, so don’t look at the nutritional facts. It does come in creamy or crunchy.
What is in cookie butter?
Trader Joe’s cookie butter, which is the only kind of cookie butter that I will acknowledge, has speculoos cookies in it. I bet you’re thinking that I need to speak in layman’s terms huh. It’s similar to a gingerbread cookie with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and lots of butter in them.
Now that we’ve gotten the basics out of the way, let’s just sit and admire this cookie butter recipe. The drizzle on top and the chocolate curls give this the perfect presentation.
I’ve been wanting to make a simple tutorial on making chocolate curls, but it hasn’t happened yet. You can also buy them on Amazon. I got some from chocoley.com and they were fantastic, but I don’t see them on the site anymore. 🙁
I’ve made a similar recipe but it’s a chocolate peanut butter layer dessert. It’s pretty popular. I was looking through the pinterest comments on that recipe and someone had said that they would replace the pudding with ganache.
That’s totally possible! I used pudding in this recipe, but grab the ganache recipe from my mocha layer cake with coffee frosting recipe and use that. It will be the perfect consistency after being refrigerated.
I have some ganache recipes that aren’t great to be sitting in the fridge for long periods. It becomes too hard and we want to keep this dessert soft, creamy, and fluffy.
Another thing I think I should say about this recipe is that this isn’t a recipe that you can make several days ahead of time. If you can’t make the day you’re planning on serving it, you can get away with it being made the night before. Anything longer than that, you’re taking a BIG risk of the whipped cream starting to separate and the brown from the chocolate pudding may start seeping through the whipped cream.
If you’re not sure about cookie butter, you can also try this as a chocolate peanut butter layer dessert! You don’t need a Trader Joe’s near you for that one and it’s super popular.
Chocolate Cookie Butter Layer Dessert
Ingredients
Crust
- 2 1/2 cup speculoos cookies
- 1 T. granulated sugar
- 1/2 cup butter melted
Cookie Butter Cheesecake
- 8 oz. cream cheese room temperature
- 1 cup creamy cookie butter
- 1 T. butter room temperature
- 3/4 cup plus 2 T. granulated sugar
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1 cup heavy cream
Chocolate Pudding
- 5.85 oz. box Instant Chocolate Pudding family size
- 1 3/4 cups milk
- 1 jar (11.75 oz.} hot fudge topping
- 8 oz. whipped topping thawed
- 1 1/2 T. smooth cookie butter
- chocolate curls
Instructions
Crust
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Add the speculoos cookies into a bag and crush with a rolling pin until the cookies are all crumbs. You could also use the food processor to make it quicker.
- In a 9x13 pan, add in the speculoos cookie crumbs, granulated sugars, and melted butter. Stir to coat all the cookie crumbs in the melted butter. Firmly press the crumbs into the pan.
- Place into the oven and bake for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool. Begin working on the cheesecake filling.
Cookie Butter Cheesecake Filling
- In a medium bowl, add in the cream cheese, cookie butter and butter. Beat on medium/high until light and fluffy.
- Add in the sugar and vanilla and beat until incorporated.
- In a separate bowl. add in the heavy cream. Beat on medium/high with a handmixer until stiff peaks form. When you pull the beaters out of the whipped cream, it should be able to hold a peak.
- Add in a quarter of the whipped cream and fold it into the cream cheese mixture. This will lighten up the mixture before adding the remaining whipped cream and deflating it all.
- Add in the remaining whipped cream and carefully fold it in.
- Spread the filling into the cooled crust. Be sure to get to all of the edges of the crust. Seal off any holes on the edges to prevent the pudding (in the next step) from seeping through and making our crust soggy.
- Chocolate Pudding
- In a mixing bowl, add in the chocolate pudding mix and milk. Using a handmixer, beat on medium until incorporated. Let thicken about 5 minutes before spreading on top of the cheesecake layer.
- Spread the pudding evenly over top of the cookie butter cream cheese layer. Be sure to get to the edges.
- Remove the lid from the hot fudge topping and microwave for 45 seconds.
- Scoop all of the fudge topping into a sandwich bag. Cut a small hole out of the corner of the sandwich bag.
- Drizzle the hot fudge topping all over the top of the pudding. I started from the corner and drizzled back and forth until everything was covered.
- Spread the whipped topping all over the top of the dessert. Again, make sure to take the topping all the way over to the edges.
- Add the 1 1/2 tablespoons of cookie butter into a sandwich bag. Place into the microwave for about 20 seconds. Squish it around in your hand to make sure it's all runny.
- Cut a small hole in the corner of the sandwich bag. Drizzle peanut butter on top of the dessert. I drizzled one direction all the way across the dessert and then drizzled in the opposite direction all the way across.
- Add on the chocolate curls.
Notes
Nutrition
Other Cookie Butter Greatness
Megan @ MegUnprocessed says
This look heavenly!
Richa Gupta says
Mouth watering stuff, this looks super delicious!