Goblin Surprise: Post-post-apocalyptic oatmeal cookies
During Larps, I'll sometimes make meals out of leftovers. Reheat stuff, add leftover ingredients; chuck pantry stock together into a meal...surprise! When I started doing this I played Wicks the Goblin, servant and general handyman for the Mage Guild. The surprise is that it usually still tastes great, since I do try to make the flavours work together after all. Hence, the name, and it has stuck.
Last weekend I cooked at Xenophobia II together with woran. The setting is post-post-apocalyptic. Society has collapsed and a new order is established. The players all hail from a group of compounds protected by a forcefield where they have been safe from the outside world for generations, where they have built a meritocratic society. Everyone is expected to Contribute, and when they no longer can, they must leave (and almost certainly die in the outside world, a place filled with bloodthirsty cannibals and who knows what else). But now the forcefield has failed, and they are forced to leave.
The setting calls for relatively simple food, certainly not any kind of excess. But in this case, there were lots of supplies which we might as well use up before they would be left behind. All in all we cooked about 25-30 dishes.
These sweet, crunchy, chewy and very filling cookies were the last item, served after time-out. Several people have asked for the recipe. The original recipe for these cookies came from here, but we tweaked it to make it fit our ingredients. Here goes:
- 60 g butter (room temperature)
- 100 g caster sugar
- 100 g brown muscovado sugar
- -> 200 g powdered sugar and caster sugar (leftovers). Less might be better, see below.
- 2 eggs
- 1 vanilla pod Scratched, we had none.
- 120 g flour
- 130 g rolled oats
- 4 g baking powder
- 4 g cinnamon (added a bit more, both to replace the flavor of the vanilla and because we had lots of it)
- 6 g salt
- 75 g pecan nuts Crunchy muesli breakfast mix (leftover from breakfast)
One more challenge: we had no oven at this location. After a bit of tweaking we found a setup which worked: a lightly greased frying pan covered with a lid, on a simmer plate on the smallest burner turned low.
Mix all the ingredients together, adding the eggs last. Take about a tablespoon of the mixture per cookie and flatten it onto the bottom of the pan. Leave the cookies a bit of room to expand - I could make about 6 cookies per batch in the pan I had. Bake for about 7 minutes until the bottom is golden brown, turn, and bake the other side for another 7.
For a final tweak, I'd use less sugar (probably about 100 grams), since the crunchy muesli adds a lot of sweetness as well. Instead of crunchy muesli you could also use trail mix or any other dried fruit (chopped small if necessary) and nuts for filling.