Our youngest daughter, Jennifer who is 16 years old, likes to try new things – and thankfully, her desire to experiment hasn’t ventured into dangerous and illegal things that would give her dad and me a heart attack. So far, she has expressed her adventurous nature by trying new sports, schools, musical instruments and recipes.

Oftentimes on the weekend, when Jennifer is procrastinating doing her calculus homework, she falls into the black hole of Pinterest and the millions of food bloggers who post enticing photos of interesting new dishes.

This weekend, she found a recipe that intrigued her; it was for Dessert Hummus. I really like hummus, in fact, I regularly buy the twin pack drums of it at Costco; and I really like dessert – I haven’t ever met one I haven’t liked – but Dessert Hummus seemed like an oxymoron.

According to Jennifer, the recipe promised to be a healthy version of chocolate chip cookie dough. It could be used as a dip for graham crackers…or eat the whole bowl yourself guilt-free because it’s gluten free (of course that cancels out the chocolate chips) and high in protein.

The recipe was simple enough – just throw everything into the Cuisinart – chick peas, some peanut butter, a little baking soda (not sure why), and some sweetener – blend it all together and stir in the chocolate chips and voila! You’ve got a dip that will have guests begging for the recipe.

Guess what…the recipe tasted like we had taken the Sabra hummus from Costco and stirred in peanut butter and chocolate chips. Jennifer even added some butterscotch chips that we had to no avail. There’s just no way that ground up chick peas are going to ever taste like butter and brown sugar.

It reminded me to beware of recipes that purport to be healthy versions of not-so-healthy foods. I can remember back to when I was about Jennifer’s age and the Atkins diet was all the rage. My friends came over while I attempted making the Atkins version of pancakes. The recipe was basically pureed cauliflower that somehow was supposed to hold together in a frying pan. Good thing we had a box of Aunt Jemima mix in the cupboard.

I certainly applaud Jennifer’s experimentation in the kitchen. There was one good thing about the Dessert Hummus recipe, it started my craving for real cookie dough. The internet didn’t fail us this time; the New York Times recipe for chocolate cookies is absolutely killer.