Skillet Christmas Cookie
One giant cookie baked in a pan over coals. Cut it in wedges and hand it around.
- calories
- 390
- weight
- 3.2 oz
- cal / oz
- 122
- protein
- 4 g
- serves
- 6, scales
- prep
- 15 min
- cook
- 20 min
- total time
- 35 min
- water
- none
- cost
- $
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Dessert
- Campfire coals
- Grill grate
- Dutch oven
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- One pot
- Pre-mix at home
- Needs a cooler
- Actual cooking
Ingredients
| Butter | 100 g | keeps a few days out of the cooler in cold weather |
|---|---|---|
| Brown sugar | 80 g | |
| White sugar | 60 g | |
| Ground vanilla | 1 tsp | vanilla extract works, use half a teaspoon |
| Egg yolk | 1 large | |
| Flour | 160 g | |
| Baking powder | 2 pinches | |
| Salt | 1 pinch | |
| Chocolate chunks, candied almonds, dried cranberries | about 1 cup total | whatever mix you like |
| Cinnamon or speculaas spice and baking cocoa | to taste |
Method
- Burn the fire down to coals. You want steady low heat, not flames.
- Melt the butter in the skillet until it bubbles. Add both sugars and the vanilla, stir over medium heat until it comes together into a grainy paste.
- Pull the pan off the fire and let it cool to lukewarm. If you skip this the yolk scrambles.
- Stir the yolk in fast, all at once.
- Mix flour, baking powder, and salt in a mug or bag, then add it to the pan in stages, stirring until you have a stiff dough.
- Fold in the chocolate, nuts, and dried fruit. Press the dough flat and even across the pan with a spoon.
- Set the pan over the coals for about 20 minutes, until the edges are golden and the middle is just set. Rotate it a quarter turn every five minutes so one side does not scorch.
- Let it sit five minutes before cutting. Straight out of the fire it falls apart.
Everything happens in the skillet, which is the point. The butter and sugar are cooked in the same pan the cookie bakes in, so there is no bowl to wash and no creaming to do by hand in the cold. Melted butter also gives a denser, chewier cookie than creamed butter would, which survives being cut and handed around better.
The one step that matters is cooling the butter-sugar mix before the yolk goes in. Hot pan plus raw yolk equals sweet scrambled egg. Coals rather than flame matter too: a cast iron pan sitting on live fire will have a black bottom and raw center in about eight minutes.
Packing
Premix the flour, baking powder, and salt at home in one bag, and the two sugars with the vanilla in another. Mix-ins go in a third. Butter and the egg ride in the cooler, or carry powdered egg yolk and skip the cooler entirely.
Variations
- Powdered egg yolk rehydrated with a teaspoon of water makes this fully shelf-stable.
- A tablespoon of baking cocoa in the flour turns it into a brownie-adjacent thing.
- Speculaas spice or plain cinnamon is what makes it read as a Christmas cookie rather than a chocolate chip cookie.
https://petromax.de/blogs/rezepte-dutch-oven/weihnachts-cookie-aus-der-pfanne