Having fun with healthy, decadent skillet cookies
Cookies are pretty perfect as they are, except when the only thing wrong with them is that there are so many.
Of course, one of the best things about cookies is that they are individually sized treats that we don’t have to share or refrigerate or eat with a fork, but sometimes the baker doesn’t want to scoop so much dough or carry a plastic container of cookies into a party, especially if it doesn’t quite feel like cookie season yet.
That’s where skillet cookies come in. I enjoyed many slices of chocolate chip cookie from Great American Cookies at the mall when I was a kid, but I hadn’t tried baking them at home until this summer.
The internet is full of skillet cake recipes — the bakers at America’s Test Kitchen identified it as an internet trend in their latest book, “The Perfect Cookie,” where they advise reducing the amount of butter and chocolate chips so that the cookie will actually bake all the way through in the oven and won’t be too gooey to handle.
The best skillet cookie recipes call for heating the butter in the pan over the stove and then mixing the rest of the ingredients right there in the skillet. It’s onedish baking at its finest, so you’ll have little cleanup, but the heat of the pan also helps the dough cook while in the oven.
Even though I like the recipes where you melt the butter in the pan first, plenty of others call for a traditional cookie dough simply spread in a skillet instead of scooped onto a cookie sheet. Some bakers find that they can use most cookie recipes as is, while others adapt them slightly to cut down on the quantity.
A recipe that yields several dozen cookies will be too much for a 10- or 12-inch skillet, so keep an eye on the flour. If the recipe calls for 2 cups or flour or more, you’ll need to reduce it to fit into a regular skillet. (Extra-large castiron skillets would be fun to experiment with, but I’ve been working with a 10-inch Lodge castiron workhorse.)
The nonstick surface of a wellseasoned cast-iron skillet, paired with the butter or fat in most recipes, means you don’t have to line the skillet with aluminum foil unless you’re making a stickier baked good, such as a brownie or a layered bar.
My favorite skillet cookie that I’ve made on this adventure was an oatmeal maple cookie inspired by a recipe on bakerbettie.com. I tweaked the ingredients to get just the right ratio of oatmeal, raisins, dates and pecans, and I found that with the addition of the dates, I could cut back on the sugar.
I made an even healthier bar a few weeks ago with whole wheat, flaxseed and other nutrient-dense ingredients, and it was more like a breakfast bar than a cookie. The kids’ favorite was a s’mores brownie with a graham cracker crust. This one needed to be cut into squares so you could eat it by hand, but slices work for other cookies that don’t have a sticky marshmallow topping that sticks to a fork.