camp meals

Cookie Monster Shake

Blue cookie milkshake rebuilt as a shaker-bottle drink with powdered milk and instant pudding.

calories
520
weight
4 oz
cal / oz
130
protein
13 g
serves
1, scales
prep
5 min
cook
0 min
total time
5 min
water
350 ml cold
cost
$

Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.

  • Dessert
  • Drink
  • No cook
  • Car camping
  • Backpacking
  • Basecamp
  • Canoe / raft
  • Vegetarian
  • Eat in the bag
  • Pre-mix at home
  • Shelf stable
  • Dump and stir

Ingredients

Whole milk powder 1/3 cup nonfat works but the shake comes out thin
Instant vanilla pudding mix 3 tbsp the thickener that replaces ice cream
Sugar 1 tbsp
Chocolate sandwich cookies 4 crushed, one kept whole for the top
Chocolate chip cookies 2 broken into pieces
Blue gel food coloring 1 small drop gel, not liquid, or you water it down
Blue sprinkles 1 tsp optional
Cold water 350 ml

Method

  1. Put the milk powder, pudding mix, and sugar in a wide-mouth bottle. Add about half the water and shake for twenty seconds so nothing clumps.
  2. Add the rest of the water and the drop of gel coloring. Shake again until the color is even.
  3. Let it sit five minutes. The pudding mix needs that time to set up into something spoonable.
  4. Crush most of the cookies in their bag with the heel of your hand and stir them in.
  5. Top with the whole cookie and the sprinkles. Drink it or eat it with a spoon depending on how long you waited.

This started as a blender drink built on ice cream, which is three things the trail does not have: a blender, a freezer, and fresh milk. Whole milk powder and instant vanilla pudding mix do the same job cold. The pudding is the important part — it has enough starch and gum to thicken plain water into something with body, so you get a shake instead of blue milk.

Use gel coloring, not the liquid kind. A drop of gel colors the whole bottle without adding volume, and it weighs nothing. Add the cookies last and drink it soon after; leave it half an hour and the pudding sets hard enough to stand a spoon in.

Packing

Milk powder, pudding mix, and sugar go in one bag together. Cookies ride in a separate rigid container or you arrive with dust. The coloring gel is a tiny tube, not a bottle.

Variations

  • Skip the coloring entirely and it is a cookies-and-cream shake that no one has to explain.
  • With a cooler, use half ice water and it comes out closer to the original.
  • A scoop of vanilla protein powder in place of the sugar pushes it past 25 g of protein.

https://zenandhoney.com/cookie-monster-milkshake