Cream Cheese Cake Mix Soft Cookies
First I am going to tell you about my fail on the first batch of the Cream Cheese Cake Mix Soft Cookies.
Wanting to make something fast and easy and knowing I would be competing with all the Holiday goodies I picked this cookie recipe.
I had never made a cake mix cookie before but figured Heh, what could go wrong.
I always test my recipes before I serve them and my guinea pig family doesn’t mind.
The cookies were a bit dry and crumbly. But I know how to fix that.
The cookies also were bite sized.
My first mistake with more to come was cheating on the directions.
Baking is much more forgiving to me than savory dishes. So I readily make substitutions that would never work.
These are the INGREDIENTS you will need:
- 1/4 cup butter or stick margarine, 1/2 cup if needed
- 8 ounces cream cheese
- 1 large egg
- 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
- 4 tablespoons milk, or as needed.
- 18.5 ounces package cake mix, any kind or color
These are the INSTRUCTIONS for preparation:
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
- Cream butter and cream cheese. Blend in egg and vanilla. Add milk slowly to avoid splattering.
- Add cake mix, 1/3 at a time. Hint: put mixer on low for this phase so the cake mix doesn’t blow all over. Mix well after each addition.
- Cover and chill 30 to 60 minutes. This is a key step. Think sugar cookies. Don’t cheat on time.
- Drop by teaspoons (or tablespoons if you want larger cookies) onto a lightly greased cookie sheet.
- Bake 10 to 12 minutes until cookie bounces back when touched.
- Cool 3 to 5 minutes before removing cookies to a cooling rack.
- Ice with your favorite frosting. Sprinkles or coconut is good also.
NOTES:
- Soften butter and cream cheese at room temperature for an hour prior to mixing up this recipe
- Use any flavor of cake mix that you want.
- Be creative adding nuts, raisins, chocolate chips, and other goodies!
I only had a half green mix left and I chose to make those cookies in 2″ balls in a Whoopie pan.
My thought was they would expand out to the edges and become perfectly round.
Nothing doing! They stayed in round balls.
The white cookies came from a full box, so I decided to make those 3″ balls and used a muffin pan in hopes of keeping their shape.
Caution: baking different sized cookies with a different mixture of ingredients is a big NO NO!
This idea turned into a total FAIL as the mix never spread and the difference in the amount of dough per cookie caused them to burn.
They actually tasted much better than they looked.
But I have OCD and am a perfectionist so I made some changes when I made the second batch.
Still needing something to add to the table, and running out of time I scraped the bottom of the cookies as best I could and loaded them in the tray.
To my delight there was so much finger food and candy on that table the cookies were overlooked.
My son took them to work the next day and put them in the kitchenette where they were devoured while folks had their coffee.
Just lets chalk this one up to a Senior Moment, shall we?
Here is a description of how to fix your dough if it is dry or crumbles as you roll it.
Avoid Dry or Crumbly Dough:
- When you blend your butter and sugar together at the beginning of your recipe, substitute liquid vegetable oil, like canola oil, for up to half the amount of butter your recipe calls for. Liquid vegetable oil adds moisture to baked goods. Fats which are liquid at room temperature provide a moist quality in baked goods.
- If you have already blended your butter and your sugar, and added your eggs and dry ingredients, and your dough seems dry, try adding a tablespoon of vegetable oil to the cookie dough.
- Keep running the mixer on low until the oil is blended in. If it still seems dry, add another tablespoon of oil and mix it in. At this point, you should stop adding oil and stop running the mixer because more mixing will make your cookies tough. The moisture in the finished cookies should be better. If not, then next time you bake the cookies, do the half butter half vegetable oil fix from the start.
This works best for drop cookies like sugar cookies, oatmeal cookies, and chocolate chip cookies and all similar refrigerator batters.
I hope this little how-to lesson helps you with all your cookies that need to be regrigerated.
I have a few more cookie tutorials in my Tip Friday series. Please check those out!
Cream Cheese Cake Mix Soft Cookies
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup butter or stick margarine, 1/2 cup if needed
- 8 ounces cream cheese
- 1 large egg
- 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
- 4 tablespoons milk, or as needed.
- 18.5 ounces package cake mix, any kind or color
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
- Cream butter and cream cheese. Blend in egg and vanilla. Add milk slowly to avoid splattering.
- Add cake mix, 1/3 at a time. Hint: put mixer on low for this phase so the cake mix doesn't blow all over. Mix well after each addition.
- Cover and chill 30 to 60 minutes. This is a key step. Think sugar cookies. Don’t cheat on time.
- Drop by teaspoons (or tablespoons if you want larger cookies) onto a lightly greased cookie sheet.
- Bake 10 to 12 minutes until cookie bounces back when touched.
- Cool 3 to 5 minutes before removing cookies to a cooling rack.
- Ice with your favorite frosting. Sprinkles or coconut is good also.
Notes
- Soften butter and cream cheese at room temperature for an hour prior to mixing up this recipe
- Use any flavor of cake mix that you want.
- Be creative adding nuts, raisins, chocolate chips, and other goodies!
Nutrition
Nutrition Information is estimated based on the ingredients and cooking instructions as described in each recipe and is intended to be used for informational purposes only. Please note that nutrition details may vary based on methods of preparation, origin and freshness of ingredients used.
Conversion Information We get a lot of requests to help with conversions especially between various countries like Canada, the U.K. and Australia. These tables should help you make those conversions. For your convenience we have included a Conversion Chart.
Disclaimer Unless indicated recipes influenced by cookbooks, magazines or family traditions.
Hello Marilyn I am Marilyn as well I made your cream cheese cake mix soft cookies I added chocolate chips and they are delicious thank you
I bet the chips made them delicious. Thanks for making them and letting me know! Feedback is so important for inspiration. I need to try adding items like that. Thanks for the tip. Have a great week!
These cookies were brought into work to share with our teams and they were quite yummy!
It was a great cross between and piece of cake and a cookie.
Thanks Marilyn!
So sweet of you to leave such a nice comment Cynthia! Thank you for coning to tell e a out. Don’t tell Mike that he is going to be bringing in a LOT of food from me as I am not supposed to be eating as much as I make! Don’t be a stranger.
These sound easy peasy to make! Too bad about the “senior moment,” (lol) but I bet they still tasted great.
Thanks for writing Kim. Me and a timer have always had a love hate relationship. 🙂 they were good, until the aftertaste.