Horrors Are Kinda My Thing

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I remember watching Little Shop of Horrors as a kid, when I probably really and truly shouldn’t have, but how could a movie about a dentist and plant be nightmare fuel for a child of 8? I was raised on Addams Family, Hocus Pocus, Nightmare Before Christmas…I liked spooky, spooky liked me, but something about a giant man-eating plant that also looked quite similar to the piranha plants from Mario scrambled my little brain, and it may or may not be the reason I refuse to garden or grown any plants indoors to this day. Inherently, plants = danger in my book (a two-month ordeal with poison ivy a few summers ago kept this fear alive). But what if I turned the tables and made a plant I would be the one eating??!

So I made the thing that haunts my nightmares edible. Shoe’s on the other foot now, Audrey II. These are cookie cups filled with chocolate protein mousse, topped with the world’s most menacing strawberries. This recipe makes 8 evil little babies that you can devour before they can devour you, at only 233 calories each. Nothing terrifying about that!

The ingredients for the cookie cups, mousse, and frosting are super simple:

• Premade cookie dough of choice (Sweet Loren’s if you’re also gluten free!); you’ll need 8 dough balls at room temp
• 172 g (3/4 cup) fat free Greek yogurt
• 60 grams (2 scoops) chocolate protein powder (I love Quest’s chocolate milkshake flavor)
• 10 grams (2 TBS) cocoa
• 60 mL (1/4 cup) sugar free syrup
• 8 medium strawberries
• A half or quarter batch of your preferred frosting (cream cheese, classic American buttercream, anything that is pipeable/can hold shape; my favorite cream cheese recipe is here). You don’t need a lot of frosting for this decoration.
• Gel dyes in green and red
• 2 leaf tips (#67 or #68 work best), 2 small round tips (#2 or #3 work best)

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees and grab a mini muffin tin. Roll your thawed cookie dough into even balls. Place these in the mini muffin tin and use the back of a tablespoon to press down gently and create a divot in the center of the cookie dough. Bake for 12 minutes.

IMMEDIATELY upon pulling the cookies out of the oven, use the tablespoon to press into each cookie gently and reform the cup. Let these cool in the pan on a cooling rack for 10 minutes while you make the mousse. Simply dump the yogurt, protein powder, cocoa, and syrup in a bowl and mix until everything is incorporated. Once your cookies have fully cooled to room temp, you can plop this evenly into each cup. I used a piping bag with a 1M tip, but the filling gets covered up, so it doesn’t have to be pretty.

Divide up your frosting so you have the following:

• Plain white frosting in a piping bag with a #2 or #3 tip
• Green frosting in a piping bag with a coupler so you can switch from a round tip to a leaf tip
• Red frosting in a piping bag with a leaf tip

I’ll give you a photo play by play here, but you can also see a video of how I assembled these on my Instagram. Start by piping leaves on the side of each cookie cup like above. Then switch to the small round tip and draw vines in front. Take a strawberry, chop off the top, then split vertically in half. Plop one half on top of the mousse, then use the red frosting with the leaf tip to pipe a tongue:

Then take the white frosting, and pipe on some pointy pearly whites for Audrey II to terrorize the neighborhood, nay, every household in America with:

She’s definitely taking shape, but we unfortunately have to give her the rest of her mouth with which to eat you with, so take the other half of the strawberry and pipe more teeth. Then grab a toothpick to secure the top of the mouth carefully to the bottom.

Isn’t she just the cutest little man-eating dessert you’ve ever seen?

She’s got a mouth on her, in more ways than one, that Audrey II.

“Shing-a-ling, what a creepy thing to be happening!” Okay, musicals are also awful as far as I’m concerned (“Hey, how about we ruin this movie every 15 minutes?” -creator of musicals), BUT this movie gets a pass because it’s absolutely ridiculous and plays into those themes perfectly in song. It might have given me a lifelong fear of anything green, but making these little Audrey II’s were the perfect amount of creepy as we inch closer and closer to Halloween, the greatest and spookiest day of them all (minus the day the plants took over in the original ending of the movie). ‘Til next time, my fellow (plant) eaters!

Recipe & Instructions