Mini Skillet Cookies

For the holidays I received a gift card to Williams Sonoma.  It was the PERFECT gift since I just love that store and every time I am in it I want to buy everything.  However, seeing as how I am a poor college student/future teacher, buying the entire store is not practical nor possible.  This gift was great and I had so much fun shopping.

One of my purchases (so far) was a set of two mini cast iron skillets.  Cast iron skillets are AMAZING.  You can literally make any type of meal in them and what's better? They are MINI.  I just love cute, miniature things.  I have been wanting to try them out for some time now and the perfect occasion arose.  

Tonight I am going over to a friends to make dinner and to celebrate surviving our first week of the spring semester.  It was difficult, and on Thursday, I wasn't sure if I was going to make it.  Thursdays class was a THREE HOUR discussion.  That's right, a discussion.  Three hours of CHATTING with fifteen other people.  How am I supposed to get through that?  There's only 15 of us and we have to meet 3 hours a week.  We are going to get so sick of each other and there's no way were are going to have that much to say.  The discussion is the 15 future math teachers in my cohort and we are supposed to talk about "how to teach math" and our experiences in schools.  I suppose we are going to have plenty of stories from school, but school has not even started yet and so Thursday was brutal.  By the end of the three hours, I felt exhausted and drained.  I returned home, turned on the tv, and pondered over how I was going to survive those Thursdays.  

Not sure how I did it, but I woke up Friday totally refreshed and crazy exited about kicking of the weekend with dinner, dessert, and of course, friends! I figured mini cookie skillets would be the perfect dessert to make for this momentous occasion.  This recipe was inspired by Sophistimom and then I decided to use my "Famous" Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe and adapt it as needed for the mini skillets. The best part of this whole experience: you do everything IN THE SKILLET and so you only dirty one (or two in this case) pans.  Seriously! Skillets are great, go run out and get one.

Mini Cookie Skillets (adapted from Sophistimom)

Ingredients:

3 cups flour

3/4 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

2 sticks (1 cup) butter, softened

3/4 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 tbsp vanilla

1 egg

1 egg white

12 oz milk chocolate chips

Directions:

Since we have two pans, you have to divide each of the ingredients in half.

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2. Melt 1/2 cup of butter in each pan over medium heat and then let cool for about 5 minutes.  Then, stir in the sugars to the butter.  This will be about 3/8 sugar and 1/2 cup brown sugar in each skillet. Finally, stir in 1/2 tbsp vanilla into each skillet.

3. Whisk the egg and egg white together and measure out about half into each skillet.  Stir to combine.

4.  In a medium bowl, or right into the skillet, mix the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.  This is about 1 1/2 cups of flour, 3/8 tsp baking soda, 3/8 tsp salt, and 1/4 tsp cinnamon each.  I combined these ingredients before I started, then poured about half of the dry ingredients into each skillet. Note: this got a little messy and I ended up pouring everything into a bowl to mix and then putting half of the batter back into each skillet.

5. Finally, stir in 6 oz of chocolate chips into each skillet and then bake for about 18 minutes (this will vary greatly based on the size of your skillet).

Note: My skillets probably had too much dough because they were done on the outside, but pretty mushy on the inside...I loved it, but next time I might only use half the batter divided into each skillet and then make some cookies with the rest.

Enjoy :)

Serving Options: Dump some ice cream, chocolate sauce, caramel, whipped cream or whatever over that skillet.  I ate mine plane because I'm a minimalist like that.