Oops I did it again. One more cake mix cookie for you. Devil’s Food? check! Vanilla? check! Now it’s time for pink to take over. A whole lot of pink. I know many of you aren’t fond of using boxed mixes in recipes. I’m on the fence about it. I love it for its convenience and the cake batter taste it gives desserts, but nothing can truly beat homemade brownies from scratch. I’ve made some fantastic cake batter flavored treats without using cake mix at all, too. It IS possible. Regardless, I haven’t been able to pin down a fantastic strawberry-dough based cookie recipe without using it, so I picked up a box of Duncan Hines strawberry cake mix the other day and things got even more pink around these parts. I know you’ll love these. 🙂 The real reason I made these? Valentine’s Day is coming up! Not that I needed an excuse for a pink cookie, but it conveniently fits the part. I took my Confetti Cake Batter Cookie recipe, subbed strawberry cake mix for vanilla and chocolate chips for the sprinkles. It’s truly the easiest cookie recipe you’ll ever find, especially for how soft, puffy, thick, and perfect they come out. You’ll literally ask yourself HOW on earth a cookie this good can start from a box. Well, it does. The dough combines 6 simple ingredients: strawberry cake mix, eggs, oil, baking powder, vanilla, and chocolate chips. Everything may come together by hand. The dough is quite dense and thick, so you’ll definitely need a bit of elbow grease to mix everything together. It’s also very oily. But do NOT worry, the cookies will still bake up thick and puffy. With strawberry chocolate chips cookies as the finished product, you definitely didn’t hear me complaining about using my arm muscles to get there. 😉 ** Note: if you’d like to sift your dry cake mix to get out all of the lumps before combining with the rest of the ingredients, be my guest. But everthing came together nicely for me without taking that extra step. ** There is also no dough-chilling required. I chill my dough for nearly every single cookie I bake—the most recent exception is my recipe for Homemade Oatmeal Creme Pies—no need to wait around for the dough to get cold and moldable. The same goes for today’s cookies. Bypass all of that and stick these cake mix cookies right into the oven. Only 20 minutes start to finish! I rolled the dough balls a bit larger than my previous cake mix cookies, about 2 Tablespoons of dough go into each dough ball. Feel free to make these any size you want—adjust the baking time accordingly and watch that they do not brown. A few of mine got a bit brown on top because I left them in 1 extra minute by mistake. That’s what I get for trying to vacuum as I bake. Cleaning < baking. Be sure to roll your balls of dough to be “taller” rather than wide. I talked about the “tall” trick in this oatmeal Raisinet cookies post. If thick cookies are your goal, make sure you don’t miss that! {sidenote: do you know how hard it is to shoot pink cookies without them looking like the pink goo from Ghostbusters? This was quite a challenging photo shoot!} Ok, back to these glorious gems. Texture wise, these cookies and very soft and light. They retain that soft-baked consistency that I know you love (and so do I!). While they come from cake mix, they are not cakey in the slightest. They are soft in the center, but very chewy around the edges. Moist, melting in your mouth—no dry crumbs in sight. And I LOVE how puffy and thick they turned out. You have the baking powder to thank for all that lift. What about their taste? The strawberry taste isn’t overpowering at all. In fact, I don’t even like strawberry cake but when baked into pink cookie form? I’m all about it. My friend Erin told me they taste like vanilla strawberry shortcake! Kevin couldn’t stop eating them, despite their fabulous girly color. 😉 And all those chocolate chips? I was actually going to add Valentine’s Day sprinkles to these cookies, but the combination of chocolate and strawberries is just one of my favorites. And with a bag of Nestle Morsels staring me in the face, I knew semi-sweet chocolate chips were the strawberry dough’s destiny. They look like a pretty pink version of my favorite chocolate chip cookies. You could even go for white chocolate instead! Cookies are pretty in pink. 🙂
