An easy, no-bake holiday treat, this cookie dough fudge is soft and creamy, with hints of vanilla and brown sugar and studded with mini chocolate chips, the same flavors that make chocolate chip cookie dough so irresistible.

If you’re obsessed with cookie dough like I am, you’re going to want to make this recipe STAT. It’s literally a slab of cookie dough flavored-fudge, but without the worry of raw cookie dough since it’s made without eggs and with heat-treated flour.

This recipe was originally published in my first cookbook over 8 years ago (Can you believe it’s been that long? I can’t!) It’s one of the handful of recipes that has really made its mark on the Internets, with dozens of bloggers having posted their versions (and that makes me so so happy). I’ll be honest I hadn’t made it myself since I made the final batch for the photo shoot, and decided it was high time I revisit this cookie dough classic. Because, y’all, I forgot just how good this ish is.

I vaguely recall the testing process for this recipe being nothing short of a disaster, having first attempted an old-fashioned brown sugar fudge somewhat like penuche I think it’s called? If I recall correctly, I threw out at least 3 or 4 full pans of too soft, too grainy, or oddly hard fudge before I finally decided to go in a different direction.

The final recipe is what I call shortcut, or cheater fudge, which uses powdered sugar rather than boiled sugar for structure. Combined with some milk, melted butter and brown sugar, and then a healthy glop of raw, eggless cookie dough and mini chocolate chips folded right in, it has the texture of your favorite holiday fudge, but the flavor of straight up chocolate chip cookie dough.

The texture is definitively fudge-like, with just a hint of graininess from the raw sugar in the cookie dough (I’d argue this texture is part of the appeal of cookie dough to begin with.) Preserving that texture is one of the reasons this is a two part recipe (folding in the raw cookie dough into the fudge base, rather than melting all the ingredients together in one pot which might taste the same, but would not have the same texture).

Mini chocolate chips give the chocolate a more even distribution, and a better balance of cookie dough to chocolate in each bite.

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