Can You Make Cookies With Cake Mix?
Welcome back on Sunday for a column on how to prepare delicious food with minimal effort. As someone who writes a column on lazy dinners, I see loads of recipes and videos for “easy” and “easy” meals. Most of them are from a bird’s eye view and include way too much F grade cheese and ranch dressing even for I like it, but I stumbled upon a few things in my usual course of Imgur night viewing.
By adding ½ cup butter and two eggs to any cake mix, you can make cookie dough. This is a pretty bold assumption. I don’t think a gluten-free mixture would give the same results as, say, a standard yellow cake mix. For the most part, making cookies is not a complicated process, and it is truly an open recipe. Also, barring emergencies, why would you use cake mix instead of, say, cookie mix? There is also no mention of the type of oil, size, cooking time or temperature of use. But I will use any excuse to make and eat cookies, so let’s go.
All the cake mixes I’ve used require oil, water and 3 eggs. This is a lot of wet ingredients, and the “recipe” excludes quite a lot of them. The first thing you’ll notice is that the “dough” is very dry with no water or extra eggs. A minute or so of hand kneading will take care of this, but the dough will be a little oily. It doesn’t look like cookie dough, but I believe in the internet. Why would I lie?
The hardest part was finding the cooking time, the measurement for each dough blade, and the cooking temperature. In a world filled with lousy (but beautiful!) Pinterest recipes, there isn’t much to do. One recipe I came across took a cook time of 4-11 minutes, which is a lot of time to open and close the oven. I picked the temperature and time from a typical Toll House recipe: 375 ℉ in 9 minutes before checking with a toothpick.
I wasn’t satisfied until 13 minutes and a clean toothpick, but since ovens vary, 9 minutes is a good time to start checking. After letting the batch cool for a few minutes – warm biscuits are the best biscuits – I took a bite of the sweet.
Not bad! But not great. The butter lends itself to a crispy top and bottom, but there is too much of it. I reached out to King Arthur Flour , who suggested that chilling the dough would slow the spread of fat during baking. So the dough went into the refrigerator, but it was still too strong.
I was approaching the end of my rope with two more boxes of mixture in tow. I needed advice. So I called my mom, who almost immediately made me feel like a fool.
“What are you writing about this week?”
“Some kind of cake mix cookie recipe I’ve seen on the internet. I’m trying to figure out if it works, but not very well yet. “
“Oh, how is Pillsbury?”
WHAT?
Yeah. Pillsbury has what I believe to be the original version of this so-called recipe, published after the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1990 . Over the past 27 years, thanks largely to the Internet, it has been sold so much that it has been turned into a purple monkey dishwasher .
Molly Taylor’s original recipe uses only 1/3 cup butter, which immediately solves the problem of greasy dough and unpleasant-tasting cookies. It leaves just enough to get a fresh look and allows for a more finished interior (albeit moist enough). She also presses the cookies with a glass to cook them faster and more evenly at higher temperatures. The dough still needs a little help to completely collect, but it’s worth it.
So, are they as good as a chocolate chip made from scratch? Never. Are they a simple alternative to a dull, rainy week like New England lately? Without a doubt. It’s an inexpensive alternative that is arguably best for children’s birthday parties and short dinners – quick to cook, with a wide, flat surface that makes decorating easy. Add-ons like lollipops and nuts do not affect cooking times, so feel free to experiment with flavor combinations for a quick and tasty treat.