Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars! It was awesome folks! If you’re anything like me, you marathon the movies before they come out, and that means that you need snacks! As has been written in the completely fictional 11th commandment: Thou shalt have movie-appropriate snacks, lest thy television fail and thy friends dessert (see what I did there?) thee! And Star Wars is a BIG movie that demands a BIG dessert! So gather round, because it’s time to make lightsaber skillet cookies! Even if my personal decorating skills are crappier than a bantha’s rear side.

Why Skillet Cookies?

For the last few weeks, I’ve taken an interest in cookies. Why is it, I wondered to myself, that so many people have trouble with cookies? By all accounts, they’re not particularly difficult. I tested recipe after recipe, seeing all of the different results they yielded. And then, one day, in the privacy of my kitchen, I had a revelation! I didn’t have enough remaining cookie dough to make more cookies, but I still had leftover dough after one recipe. So rather than eat it straight, I decided that I’d put it into one of my tiny little skillets and cook it that way. And it. was. good. Like really, really good. So I did more experiments, baking all of the cookie dough together in larger skillets. And they were all, hands down, the greatest cookies I’ve eve made. But why?

It all comes down to mass.

See, the greater the mass of an item you cook, the more moisture it has and the more insulation it has around its center. That means that the outside will likely crisp, but the inside will stay tender and juicy, a classic pairing, and for good reason.

But now let’s look at cookies. The average cookie has only about a tablespoon of dough. It’s not a lot, and what is initially an already small ball cooks to become an extremely thin cookie. So the already nearly massless cookie is losing moisture quickly because there’s just so little of it. But then it loses even more because it spreads out, and there’s more surface area that’s losing moisture. And at the end of it, you end up with a sad, sad cookie better suited to being bantha fodder than human dessert. True, you can save this with a little bit of hard work and skill, but to the average baker, even the above average baker, there’s a huge risk of it crisping way too much. But what happens when we cook the entire batch of cookie dough at once? Well, we solve one problem right off the bat, because It doesn’t have much of an opportunity to spread out, and therefore will lose moisture at a relatively constant rate instead of the single cookie, which will lose moisture at an accelerating rate throughout the cooking process. But it also means that the interior part of the cookie, the part that we want to be as scrumdiddlyumptious as humanly possible is largely shielded from the heat and, thus, loses less moisture. and in fact, because of the fact that proteins are like a sponge and heat is like pressure, the moisture that the skillet cookie is beginning to lose can be reabsorbed by the cookie, leading to minimal moisture loss and fantastically tender, moist, butterschotchy chocolatey insides. And that’s just good science.

The Frosting

The toughest part of this whole thing isn’t actually making the cookie. Nope it’s doing the frosting! The better you were at Kindergarten-level art, the better you’ll be at this part! If you’re like me, and you nearly failed Kindergarten for not being able to draw or color inside the lines, then this will be nearly impossible despite its apparent simplicity. If, however, you were even moderately proficient at art, this may just be a breeze for you.

The only relevant tip to offer here is this: laying down the frosting is more or less like drawing with a pen — you can’t erase anything or go back to fix much, but the feel of using the piping bag will be very similar to using a pen. So just think of it like that and it should be a LOT less scary.

And that’s all there is to this cookie! We’ll talk about the movie and how butter and sugar create really cool structures that give frosting its shape some other time! Enjoy the movie! And may the Force be with you.