Wham, bam, thank you…egg-free peanut butter cookie dough. Filled with peanut butter and butterscotch chips. Covered in chocolate with peanut butter drizzle. Because boy, do you make life that much better.

To be honest, I need a little more chocolate therapy than usual this week. My body is sore thanks to a tubing incident, and I need to dull the pain, doctor.

This past Friday, Kenny and I decided to go on a summer adventure together. Sometimes when our kids are at camp, we have daytime dates. In the D.C. area, there’s so much to do. This time, we decided to drive out to a creek near Antietam (yep, the Civil War battle site) and go tubing. As a Civil War nerd and a lover of the water, I thought it would be the perfect day trip.

A local magazine had described this particular journey as relaxing. The article painted the picture of a lazy day on the creek, with an extra tube for your cooler. According to everything I read, you could float on down slowly, beaching the tube when you felt like it and eventually winding up at your destination. That’s what I thought we were in for.

When we got to the rental place, Kenny and I were given our tubes. The only thing we were told to do was avoid the trees. Sounds easy, right? Maybe, if you have a paddle and some control over your mode of transport. For the first time, the expression “up a creek without a paddle” made complete sense to me. Especially when I wound up tubing (and screaming) my way through a downed tree, emerging several scratches later with my hat gone.

But the real kicker was when Kenny’s tube flipped over in the rapids. We had been told there were light rapids, and I guess everyone’s definition of “light” differs. In any case, these rapids were strong enough to dump Kenny, his shoes, and his phone right into the water. His tube started to float away and I, still on my tube, began to face the reality that unless I did something, I’d be one husband down for the rest of the day. Without shoes, Kenny had no way to walk on the rocks at the bottom of the creek without being in a lot of pain and without moving very slowly.

So I bailed out of my tube, dragged it over to his rapidly disappearing tube, and used a makeshift oar (a giant stick I named “Oarie”) to struggle my way back toward Kenny. The most fun part was lifting both tubes and Oarie over my head while going the wrong way against the rapids to get to him. I’m guessing that’s why my entire left side flew into spasm, and why now, two days later, I’m in a ton of pain. But no fear. I’ve got my massage therapist on speed dial and a plate full of these butterscotch peanut butter cookie dough truffles.

These come together in a snap, and the best thing about the recipe is that it only makes about eight truffles. That means you don’t have to worry about going too crazy with eating a lot. If you’d like, double it, or triple it. But if you do that, use a mixer. In a small batch, a small bowl is needed, no mixer. Your decision!

The combo of butterscotch chips with the peanut butter chips and PB cookie dough is what you find if you look under the word “addictive” in the dictionary. You can leave these plain, or do what I did and dip them in melting chocolate. For flair, I melted some peanut butter chips and piped lines across the top.

Guys, I’m happy to be alive, even if I’m in pain. I’m also thrilled to brag to Kenny now that I saved him, even though he would’ve maybe made it down the river 10 hours later. So all’s well that ends well, especially if there are truffles!

Earlier today, my son threw away a broken paper fan. As he was getting rid of it, he eyed the plastic casing for the fan and said, “Maybe I should keep this. It might be useful.” I, the anti-hoarder, made it pretty clear that a broken fan plastic casing would never, in any way, be remotely useful.

Now, if I were to hoard anything in this world, it would be baked goods and chocolate. Earlier, I pulled a chocolate-dipped peanut butter Oreo out of the freezer and munched on it. It had been triple-wrapped and frozen since December. But you know, that stuff never gets hoarded for long. Somehow, even with things frozen away, I can’t forget about them.

Now that it’s Girl Scout cookie season, you can be pretty dang sure that I’m storing several boxes of GS cookies in the freezer as well. I’m one of those people who pulls out a sleeve of Thin Mints several months after prime GS cookie selling season and serves them to grateful house guests. If a Thin Mint tastes good in Feburary, its cool appeal is even more seductive in the heat of summer.

Now, I’m a Tagalong girl, and that ain’t no lie. But these right here are for you Thin Mint lovers out there. It’s a little bit of an extreme approach, but you know I’m all about decadence.

So what’s going on here? Simple. Chocolate cookie dough (egg-free, of course!) sandwiched between two Thin Mints and dipped into white chocolate. Yep. I did that. Feel free to let the binge session commence.

These are actually super simple to make, and you can either do fun drizzliness with the white chocolate or you can dunk the sandwich in whole. Or both, in my case. And if you have leftover cookie dough, make truffles!

These traveled with me to a housewarming party for some dear friends of mine, and boy, is their new house clutter-free. Seriously not one bit of mess in sight. So I added to it slightly with these bits of Girl Scout madness, and while they could hoard them, my guess is that everyone at the party ate them already. Moral of the story: don’t hoard, unless it’s chocolate. You can make Girl Scout season go a long way!

When my eldest daughter got home, she shoved her pumpkin at me and said in her serious little-girl way, “My teacher says you have to make soup.”

I took the pumpkin, sighed (this is an annual struggle as I literally cook the fruits of my childrens’ labor), and said, “How about cookies?”

My daughter, who is occasionally reasonable, agreed. But then I faked her out. You see, I’ve gotten smarter over the years. The first year this happened, I actually cooked the pumpkin. This year, I hid it and used the canned stuff to make cookies. It’s smoother and works better anyway.

You’ll notice that the majority of pumpkin cookie recipes circulating these days have no egg. A lot of that has to do with moisture. Pumpkin binds and adds moisture, so the egg is not as necessary when you make these little guys. But I’m not gonna pretend that these are healthy, because yeah, there’s butter.

The dough is very soft and needs to be chilled. I put in those caramel-filled chocolate chips and they worked so well with the pumpkin, but improvise. A ton of other options work just as well, from white chocolate to butterscotch chips. Happy sighs all around. And they’re definitely better on the second day. They get really soft and chewy.

Listen, there’s not much I can do to stop my kids from flooding the house with pumpkins every year. All I can do is fake them out and make dessert. It’s a fabulous defensive maneuver.

Hold on to your hats. Because I never realized that bark, one of the best treats ever, could be made in cookie form. Guess what? Epiphany time, people!

I was in the grocery store minus my children (wow, am I ever with them?) the other day, which is known in my world as a vacation. It was so lovely. I was wandering up and down aisles, looking at packaging without having to tune out a baby shrieking in my ear or feeling harassed, when I came upon the Brownie Brittle display. Have you seen that stuff? Basically, there are several different flavors of these thin, crispy brownie pieces. Some of them have chocolate chips, others toffee. It doesn’t really matter. The point is, when you bite in, you taste brownie. And I wanted to do the same thing, but with a cookie instead. So cookie bark was born!

It’s fun. And you know what? It’s also egg-free. If you want to eat the dough while you’re putting it all together, it won’t hurt you a bit. Talk about a bonus!

The dough is a perfect base for any mix-ins you like. This time I chose mini M & Ms, but you can use chocolate chips, toffee bits, chopped up peanut butter cups…the possibilities are endless! And you can be very sure I’ll be exploring all those options.

This bark fulfills so many taste cravings. Do you like crunchy food? Check. Sugar? Check. Chocolate? Check! Cookies? Need we ask?!

It’s so easy. You just press the dough onto a Silpat baking sheet or parchment paper, bake for a bit, and then smash the bark into pieces in a totally haphazard and inexact way. Then you store it away in a container, unless you’ve eaten it all. I kind of went a bit crazy eating the dough, but still had some bark left. Not a lot. Some.

On a totally unrelated (okay, mildly related) topic, I got this awesome mug in Williamsburg that pretty much sums me up. I think it explains my passion for sugar perfectly:

There. I just laughed. Now grab those beaters, people! Time to take bark to a whole new level.

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
• 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 and 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup mini M & Ms

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350. Line a cookie sheet with a silicone baking sheet or parchment paper.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugars until fluffy. Add the salt and vanilla and mix again. Finally, add the flour gradually and beat until combined.

Press the cookie dough evenly onto the baking sheet, making a flat layer that spreads out to the edges. Put the pan into the oven and bake for 25 minutes until the edges are browned and the middle is set.

Allow the pan to cool. Break the cookie bark into pieces with your hands and store in an airtight container.