Few things are more comforting than a warm batch of chocolate chip cookies. Whether you are dipping them in a glass of milk or getting a bit more adventurous and pairing your chocolate chip cookies with beer, the result is the same: joy. But what if you don’t have access to an oven to whip up those favorite sweet treats? Well, the mad scientists over on TikTok cooked up another viral recipe for you: scrambled cookies.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their universal appeal, there are a lot of hacks out there for making cookies without an oven. Toaster ovens can be a great device for small-scale baking, but you can also make chocolate chip cookies in the air fryer. Some folks have even gone so far as to use a waffle iron for making cookies. But scrambled cookies may be the first viral method for making a batch of cookies with the most universal cooking implement: the skillet.
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♬ original sound – Archived Chef 🍯
In this TikTok recipe, the cook adds a couple of dollops of chocolate chip cookie dough to a skillet over low heat and covers it with a lid. Once the cookies begin to cook, she flips them over and breaks them up into little chunks with the spatula, and cooks each bit through. The final plating is a pile of these pieces topped with vanilla ice cream, caramel sauce, and a maraschino cherry. While these “scrambled” cookie bits aren’t half bad, there’s more than one way to make a cookie on the stovetop.
Tips and tricks for stovetop cookie baking
For those of us who have lived without an oven, this trick is nothing new. Five years of living in a converted school bus and cooking all my meals on a three-burner stove have taught me a lot about baking without an oven. But these skills aren’t just for weirdos like me; there are lots of places in the world where ovens are not a standard appliance. Ovens are uncommon in home kitchens in many countries (particularly in Asia). And many small apartments around the world may have only a small stove for cooking at home.
When it comes to stovetop cookies, there is no reason you need to scramble them. The TikTok video touts this scrambled method as a time-saving solution for making cookies, and chopping the dough up into little bits will certainly speed up the cooking process. But you can also make cookies in a skillet while maintaining their classic shape. You just have to treat them a bit like pancakes. Keep the heat low and use a lid on the pan — just like in the video — but instead of scraping everything to bits, just let the cookies naturally spread out as they cook, and flip them when they’re ready. They will come out of the pan looking a little flat and smooth compared to what you get from the oven, but they will be every bit as delicious.
Picking the right dough for stovetop cookies
Now, baking tends to fall more on the exacting, sciencey side of the cooking spectrum, and it is important to note that making cookies in a skillet is decidedly not that. But it does work — especially if you stick to the right kind of dough. There are a lot of different cookie recipes out there, and some will work just fine on the stove while others are likely to make something of a mess. In a skillet, you need the dough to be pretty pliable. Chocolate chip is a perfect dough texture for stovetop cookies, but lots of others work as well. A dough like these chewy chocolate gingersnap cookies will work great, but skip chilling the dough. Similarly, these lemon gooey butter cookies ought to fry up just fine, but you won’t be able to achieve that signature crinkle look.
As for cookies to steer clear of on the stovetop, anything with a crumbly texture is liable to lead to disaster. Scrambled cookies are one thing, but cookie dust is a lot less appealing. For this reason, you’re likely to have less luck with recipes that don’t use egg as a binder, like shortbread or Mexican wedding cookies. That’s not to say that it can’t be done, though, if you like a challenge.
Next time you find yourself without an oven and with a cookie hankering, now you’ve got two tricks up your sleeve. You can flip your cookies like flapjacks or scramble them into little bits like the trendy pancake batter breakfast spaghetti. Either way, problem solved.
