Wrestling With Food: No-Bake Cookies a la Viscera

The WWF Cookbook is a treasure trove of crazy recipes from the Attitude Era, each of which is purportedly the creation of one of the wrestlers. In Wrestling With Food, Sydney is on a mission to try cooking all of them to see if any are actually edible.

Oh man, our first dead wrestler recipe. True confession time, readers: I had to try this recipe out twice because the first time was an utter failure and I didn’t want to leave it at that, given he died so recently. Good ol’ Viscera deserves better. Have you guys read the wiki entry on his death? His wife had him cremated and had his ashes made into FIVE HUNDRED pendants for friends and family. WHAT IN THE WHAT. Do you think Steve Blackman is one of the five hundred?

Also, the JR comment on the recipe makes me a little sad for Viscera:

“Quite honestly, we don’t encourage Big Vis to put away a lot of cookies. We’d like to see his weight under 500 pounds, as we don’t want to adversely affect his dropkicks. But even Big Vis needs a treat every now and then, and who’s gonna tell him to put down the cookies?”

Moving on! So, no-bake cookies. I have never had success with these or those refrigerator cookies but wanted to give it a shot given the ease of the recipe and the fairly limited amount of ingredients:

The ingredients:

½ cup butter (1 stick).

2 cups sugar.

½ milk.

4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder.

2 cups oatmeal.

½ cup peanut butter.

1 teaspoon vanilla.

(Will make 2-3 dozen cookies).

The process:

1. Combine butter, sugar, milk, and cocoa in a saucepan, boil the mixture for one minute.

NOTE: The first attempt at this recipe I boiled exactly for one minute and that was NOT ENOUGH. I turned to google, and learned that two to three minutes (but not four) is optimal for this type of recipe. So, second round, I boiled for three.

2. Remove pan from the stove, add the oatmeal, peanut butter, and vanilla.

TIP:  Measure this stuff out before you start, you’ve gotta get all this stuff in there fairly quickly.

3. Form into balls and drop them on to wax paper. (Um, with what, WWE? My hands? In the hot mixture? I used an ice cream scoop).

4. Let cool and serve.

So, the last time I made these, the mixture seemed entirely too liquid-y and I decided to pour it out onto the pan and make it into bars. It never really set (even after time in the freezer and the fridge) and we basically just had a bar of not-quite-fudge in the fridge for a few days before I called it a day and tossed it out.

This time! I was actually able to remove the cookies from the wax paper. I will say these still have more of a crumbly fudge-like texture – calling them cookies seems slightly inaccurate – but I’m always going to be a fan of the peanut butter chocolate combination.

That said, they are SWEET. Not quite as bad as the good Lord Henry’s Sexual Chocolate cake, but with 2 cups of sugar, cocoa powder and peanut butter, they aren’t far behind.

The verdict:

Me:

Not bad, and certainly easy to make on the fly but you need to be very careful with the boiling time for the sugar.

My star rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

Comments from Tom:

Oh man, these are TOO SWEET, and not in the nWo way. I managed one, but it took a couple of attempts. They’re not bad, they just need something to off-set it all – I might try again with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream or something.

Tom’s star rating: 2 out of 5 stars.

Until next time, friends!

– Look out for another Wrestling With Food soon, or check the Wrestling With Food archives for a full rundown of all the recipes covered so far. In the meantime, you can follow Sydney on Twitter.