Healing Your Inner Child Dairy-Free Dunkaroos

In the most recent Great British Bake Off episode that I’ve seen, the theme was “Back to School.” When you’re a child living with a dairy or other food allergies, school and social time with peers can be a time of fear and exclusion. So much has changed in terms of awareness, sensitivity, and the variety of allergen-friendly packaged treats over the last few decades, but children often still feel left out from eating the same treats as their friends.

When I was growing up in the 90s, Dunkaroos were my holy grail. Kids brought them for snacks in school, and our teacher requested the empty containers for our painting supplies in art. I always had eat my pretzels and baby carrots, and bring in an egg carton to art class, and obviously stand out. Of course, we should be teaching inclusion, sensitivity, and not being afraid to be ourselves, but being a kid is hard enough! Also, the little cookies dipped in frosting in the cute little packaging really had a grip on my imagination.

I had stumbled across this recipe for homemade Dunkaroos by one of my favorites, the Pioneer Woman herself, Ree Drummond, and bookmarked it for a special occasion. Isn’t life a special occasion? The Great British Bake Off certainly is, so it felt like the right time to indulge my childhood fantasy. Did it live up to the hype once I freed the recipe of dairy?

Enough with the preamble, let’s find out!

Method

Recipe source:

https://www.thepioneerwoman.com/food-cooking/recipes/a44953646/homemade-dunkaroos-recipe/

Dairy-Free Modifications:

I used dairy-free margarine (Imperial brand) instead of butter in both the cookies and the frosting.

Procedural Notes:

The recipe is two parts: the cookies and the frosting, and both come together in a fairly standard way.

Cookies:

The cookies involve creaming butter (read: margarine) and sugar, adding the dry ingredients, and then chilling before shaping and baking. I found the dough to be very delicate, especially when I tried to roll it out and cut it. I also didn’t have a cute tiny animal shaped cookie cutter, so I used a mini jam jar to make circles. The author suggests refrigerating the dough after cutting it and before baking if you want to really preserve crisp edges to your shaped cookies.

Frosting:

This came together super simply in the mixer, with the toughest part being getting the marshmallow fluff out of the container!

Results

For a minute, I felt like the coolest girl in the second grade. The cookies aren’t as sweet as you might expect, more like a graham cracker or a less sweet ginger molasses cookie. Fortunately, that means that it balances better against the insanely sweet frosting. I can see why all the 8-year-olds loved these.

Discussion

These were pretty tasty, and gobbled up pretty well by visiting family. As mentioned, the overpowering sweetness of the frosting was balanced by the less sweet cookie. These were definitely fun to make and eat, and felt like I redeemed 8-year-old Emily with the dairy allergy.

The dairy-free modifications were straightforward, simply swapping margarine for butter in both the cookie and frosting. It kind of makes me mad that I couldn’t eat these all along for what would have been such a minor swap! Surely margarine is also cheaper to use than butter, and I don’t think the makers of Dunkaroos were going for the high quality standards for the palates of the elementary aged.

Some possible limitations, depending on your perspective: I baked the cookies for the lower range of the recommended time, so I do wonder if they would have been crisper if I had baked them for slightly longer. Despite this, they still held together even when dipping into the thick frosting. We also found there to be much more frosting than needed for the amount of cookies to be dipped, though this isn’t necessarily a problem. I’m considering making some cupcakes or mug cakes to make sure nothing goes to waste.

Overall, these weren’t by most favorite treat. It’s possible that making them with my favorite chocolate buttercream frosting and a more tried-and-true cookie recipe or pretzel would do the trick. However, it’s also very possible that I’m just not the same now as I was almost 3 decades ago. My palate has changed, and I’ve had access to making and sampling so many more dairy-free treats. We can’t go back in time, but I strongly believe there’s always a lot to learn by reflecting on the past, trying new things, and making our own path forward.