Cast Iron Chocolate Chip Cookie

We were supposed to be driving down to Utah to visit with my sister's family this past weekend, but there's this little pandemic that put the kibosh on those plans. I know we're all getting bored with it, but Utah is particularly bad right now and so many places are getting worse that it's absolutely not the right time to be travelling and visiting family. We're feeling pretty sad about this, as we are finally at a place in our lives where we feel like we were settled enough (not in school, moving, changing jobs, buying a house, etc) and the kids are old enough that we can actually plan trips without them being terribly stressful. We weren't particularly going to enjoy driving for 13 hours, but it was going to be so worth it to hang out with their family for a week. This summer was also supposed to be the first year both kids went to sleep-away camp, and Ryan and I had planned to do some local exploring while they were gone. Hopefully next year.

Since we weren't able to make our Utah trip, we did some more baking. One of Ryan's birthday gifts for me was a new cast iron skillet. I'd finally accepted that I was never going to get around to scouring and re-seasoning the one we already had, and they're inexpensive enough that I figured I'd just get a new one and try to start off on a better footing with it than I did the last one. But I needed to measure the skillet to make sure I got the correct size and never got around to that. Ryan did, though, and it's so exciting to have a new one! I treated it to a few more layers of seasoning (I've done this recently on our small one and am really pleased with how it turned out/how it's been working).

Old one. Definitely not irredeemable, just needing more time than I have.

New one, all nice and shiny after I'd added a couple coats of oil

Ryan's spent the past few days reading up on cast iron; he probably knows way more than I do about it at this point. And he remembered a video we'd watched at a friend's house from America's Test Kitchen of them making a chocolate chip cookie in the cast iron. We decided that should be our first bake.

I started off by burning the butter (wasting so much butter lately with all my mistakes!), but once we re-started everything went smoothly. The end result - a giant chocolate chip cookie that didn't stick at all to the pan. Crispy on the edges and soft in the middle. A fun alternate way to make chocolate chip cookies if you aren't wanting to scoop and bake individual sheets.