Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake Recipe – 4 Layers of Soft & Chewy Goodness!

Bold Bakers, I've been making YouTube videos for 11 years. And over the years, there might be some videos that I made that you've never even seen that were a big hit for us, just like this chocolate chip cookie layer cake. Aw, look at young Gemma. So many years ago, this was our second video. This was our old house in Santa Monica, which I absolutely adored, and I actually miss looking at these videos. One thing I noticed about my very early videos was that I didn't blink, just like in this video here, but thankfully 11 years later I've learned to do so, just like any normal human being. When we shot these videos, it was just Kevin and I in the kitchen. I will admit, our lighting is a little bit funky and inconsistent, but it was YouTube 11 years ago, everybody's was. Here's me talking about the importance of good quality chocolate, and I'm still saying that today. There's me showing you the butter wrapper trick that my mom taught me many years ago, and I still do today. I have to admit, even all that time ago, those cookies look really good. You know, I don't even remember when I came up with the idea for a cookie cake, and it was before cookie cakes were a thing, so it just goes to show you how things catch on. I was really proud of this cake back then, and I still am to this day, so I thought this was a perfect opportunity to take this recipe, update it a little bit, add new tips to it, and share it with you guys again. It's a fantastic one, and I know you're going to love it. Let's make our cookie dough. I absolutely love this cookie dough. The first thing we want to do is start out with softened butter. That's really important for this recipe, because we need it to cream up really well. If you're doing it in a pinch, feel free to pop it into the microwave, but be very careful you don't melt it. We just want it lovely and soft. This is such a big dough. You're definitely going to want a stand mixer to mix it, because doing it by hand would be pretty tough. Okay, lovely. Now we're going to start out with just the butter in there, and I'm going to cream that by itself, just for around 20 seconds or so, to loosen it up. I see that there's no lumps. This is perfect. And now I'm going to start to add in my sugars. Now some of my favorite cookies have two different types of sugars, so in goes the white. This is just regular granulated caster sugar. When your butter is already creamed, it does make it so much easier to then add in your sugars. They combine so much better. And next we're going to go with our brown sugar. Now the brown sugar adds a few things, extra moisture into our cookie, because it has a higher moisture content than the white sugar. So it gives you that gooey cookie, and it also gives you lovely caramel flavors. All of my cookies have to have dark brown sugar. So when this mixture is well creamed, that's when we can go in with the egg. So you want room temperature eggs, one at a time, because when they're room temperature, they just mix in so much better. So add in one, let it combine. Oh, okay. Normally you would add in one at a time. In this instance, two is just fine. After the eggs, we're going to go in and add our vanilla extract. Now I said it back then, and I'll say it today, some good quality vanilla extract will go a very long way. That's it. We're just going to turn that off right now. That chilled there for a minute. We're going to mix together our dry ingredients. So in this bowl, as you can see, I've got a lot of all-purpose flour, which is just plain flour. Here I have my baking soda, and I did this tip 11 years ago in the video, and I'm going to do it again now. And I learned this at Bally Maloo from Dorena Allen, which was baking soda can be very clumpy, and nobody wants to bite into a lump of baking soda when they're eating something. So my best practice always was just to put it into the palm of your hand or put it in the bowl or whatever, break up those lumps, because that's not going to break up once it goes into your mixture. Baking powder isn't this lumpy. Never. But baking soda is. Now we're going to add that into our all-purpose flour, followed by some salt, which is so important in cookies. It's so important in all of our baking. But cookies and breads and things like that, it's super important. Give these dry ingredients a mix together to combine until they're evenly mixed. Have you noticed I'm blinking a lot more than in your original video? I pride myself on that. That's my party trick. The lady that can blink. There we go. Lovely. Okay, let's turn back on the machine, and this is so much flour to this butter mix. So we're going to add it in in two, just on low, just low. Add it in in two lumps. This is why it's so much easier to do on the machine. It does all the heavy lifting for you. There you go. It's almost mixed. We're going to add in the rest of the flour. Lovely. And then just mix it. And we're just going to. It's almost combined. I'm just going to run, you know the way, I'm going to run my spatula under the bowl, because you never know sometimes what's going on underneath there. This wolf mixer actually is really good. It gets to the bottom. We never want to over mix recipes when flour has gone in for something like cakes and cookies. So now that our dough has come together, we're going to just add in our bittersweet chocolate. I use bittersweet chocolate bar, and I chop it up really fine. This is my preference over chocolate chips. Years ago I did say chocolate chips, it was an option. Buy chocolate. Buy a bar of chocolate so much better. That's it until it comes together, just like that. Oh my gosh. That's a lot of cookie. This cookie dough is going to give us four layers for a big huge cookie cake. So that's it. That's how easy it is. We're just going to bring in our tins now and start to fill them. So here I have four nine inch pans buttered and lined. Now I know everyone does not have four nine inch pans. So a tip I gave in the original video that I'm very proud of is that you can actually do it on baking trays. You can get a piece of parchment paper, draw the nine inch circle, and then shape your cookie to fit that circle. Definitely chill your dough before you do that and then bake them. And then that's another really easy solution. So what we want to do is divvy this mixture up evenly between the pans. And if you are a little bit like me, you're going to want to know exactly the right number. So each pan should have around 675 grams. It just gives you better results when each pan has the exact same amount so you know the cooking time is going to be the exact same. So now what you want to do is just with your hands, just press it evenly as you can into your pans. So if you're new to BBB, you might not have seen like all of these old videos. Over the 11 years, I've made over like 900 videos. So it's why I look like that 11 years ago and it's why I look like this now. So there's probably a lot for you to catch up on. But back then, it was just Kevin and I filming in my tiny little house in Santa Monica that we rented for almost eight years until we had our son. But it was Kevin and I, Kevin behind the camera, we had two cameras. We had a tiny space to work in. The table that I was using was not even a table, it was actually a leaf out of our dining room table and it was sitting on a cart. So I didn't even have a proper kitchen counter to work on. We had to put it up every single week. And you know, we made that work for like I said, like eight years. We did the same thing for eight years and there was something really charming about it. We moved to that house and we moved into this house and we built this lovely kitchen and we have more space for ourselves and for our child and to produce more videos. But there's something that was so lovely, charming about that little house in Santa Monica. And it was where BBB started, you know? We worked out of that house every day for eight years, producing videos, you know, creating our website, you know, creating our mug line, our baking line, like, oh my gosh, when I think about it, it's been a busy 11 years. And two cookbooks, how did I forget that? Two cookbooks. I must have blocked it out. Two cookbooks were produced in that house. Oh my gosh. So those look good. They're nice and flat. The last thing I'm gonna do is sprinkle M&Ms. I have to say, M&Ms are one of my favorite candies. I absolutely love them. That and a Twix. Those are my top two. And I love them in a cookie. I just think that they give a lovely pop of color, a nice contrast. I just think they're really fun. And definitely this cake is for the whole family. It's for kids, it's for adults, it's for celebrations. They just add a lovely pop of color and just make it kind of fun. There we go. So now here's something I wanted to update the recipe with. When you have your cookie dough like this, something I've started doing over the last few years is aging cookie dough. And by aging cookie dough, you get more flavor and you get better texture. This is going to give you a lovely, gooey cookie. And aging is going to make it a little bit saltier, have way more flavor. All of these ingredients are gonna marry together. And it's also gonna make it a little bit gooey-er. So what I like to do now for this recipe, I cover each with cling wrap. I sit them in there like that. And I lay cling wrap between each layer. So here's the thing. If you only have a few hours to put these into the fridge, that's totally fine. But you can leave them in the fridge for up to three days and the flavor and texture is just gonna get better and better and make that end result so yummy. So we're gonna bake our cookie layers fan-assist because there's four tins going into the oven. You want to bake them at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for roughly 20 to 22 minutes. We want to be careful not to over-bake our layers, otherwise our cookie will end up dry. So here's a really important tip, how you can tell when your cookie is baked because everybody's timing may vary. You want, you know, the cookie to be firm under your finger, but you also want to be a little bit soft in the middle there. What we want is a gooey cookie in the center because it's gonna make for a really good cake. We don't want over-baked cookie because it's gonna get kind of hard. We want soft. So less is more with the baking for sure. So nice and kind of like soft under your finger. As they cool, they will firm up and then they'll be perfect. That's what I'm gonna do right now. I'm gonna let them cool down in the pan and then I'm gonna get ready to decorate them. So now assembling the cake, we need buttercream frosting. This is my best ever buttercream frosting recipe. The recipe is on BiggerBolderBaking.com along with the videos here on YouTube and it's really easy to make. Let's pick out or identify our best looking cookie for the top. So I'm going to push, I'm gonna start decorating the other ones. So then down flat, make sure your buttercream frosting is at room temperature so it's spreadable. And we're going to want to divide the recipe. This is one recipe of my buttercream frosting. We're going to want to divide it between the three layers. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put a smear of the buttercream frosting on the platter because I could feel it sliding underneath me and then you can put on your cookie. I didn't do that smear in the original video and it definitely does help. Be generous with our buttercream frosting in between these layers. The lovely thing about this cake is that you do not need to be an expert cake decorator. As you can see, I am not. Bring that frosting out to the sides because you want to see it peek-a-boo from the size of the cookies. So redoing old recipes and making them even bigger and bolder is one of my new series for 2025 but I also have lots of other ones like making recipes that are usually really expensive for just $5. Like a birthday cake, a fantastic birthday cake for just under $5. I made a gourmet pizza with like really good quality ingredients in my pizza oven and that was just $5. I also have a 5 ingredient series where I made Scottish Baps with using just 5 ingredients and homemade Reese's peanut butter cups and they are so good. And you'll be happy to know my Bold Baking Basics series is back which I started many years ago and it was really popular for us. And we've come up with some new ideas to share as Bold Baking Basics which are just you know videos showing you how to make regular baking ingredients from scratch at home and giving you lots of tips and tricks. So if you haven't seen any of those videos yet for the new year, definitely check them out. And there you go, our last layer. Give it a little smush down so the frosting kind of has a little peek-a-boo moment and just comes out the sides. Gorgeous. This looks absolutely fantastic. Once you assemble your cake you can enjoy it straight away otherwise you can let sit at room temperature for up to 12 hours. It's best to leave this cake out at room temperature because the flavor and the texture will be so much better. If you want you can make and assemble this up to 12 hours in advance which will make life so much easier on the day of a birthday or a big celebration. I'm thrilled about how this cake looks on the outside but I'm really curious about the inside so let's cut a big slice. And there we have it, you see those gooey cookie layers that I was going for? This is exactly what you want from your cookie cake. A gooey baked cookie every single layer. That's going to be really delicious to eat. If you ask me, this is the best kind of birthday cake. It can be made in advance, it's easy to assemble and who does not love chocolate chip cookies? Because this is a whole lot of cookie, make sure you serve this cake with a big glass of cold milk. The flavor is amazing because we aged the dough and because this is freshly baked cookie, the chocolate chips are still melty on the inside. The flavor is amazing, the texture is incredible because you've got the soft buttercream and the crispy gooey cookie. I mean this is insane, this is absolutely insane and this is what I'm having for my birthday this year. I hope you enjoyed this redo of an old recipe, stick around because I've got hours more content for you to check out. I'll see you back here again, same time, same place, next week.