My number one, must have, Christmas cookie is a crinkle cookie. There will not be any other holiday cookie that tops this one for me. While I love the chocolate flavor the most, I can appreciate the other variations of flavors like lemon and red velvet. I was so excited when I stumbled upon this mix at the store. I’ve made crinkle cookies from scratch every single year since learning to bake so I am ready to jump in and see just how this mix compares to the scratch variation because we know I love a good shortcut.
Unfortunately, I have to start with a complaint. The iconic look of a crinkle cookie requires it to be covered in powdered sugar prior to baking so it cracks apart and gives it the crinkle appearance. Despite showing a cookie exactly like this on the package, Betty Crocker does not provide powdered sugar or address it as an additional ingredient or step. This seems to be a BYOPS situation (bring your own powdered sugar).
Just like every other Betty Crocker mix we’ve tried this season, it’s a few simple steps. Add butter, eggs, and water to the powdered mix to get a cookie dough. I was super excited when I poured out the cookie mix and found it full of chocolate chips, I really enjoy chocolate chips in my chocolate crinkle cookies to the point where I was debating straying from the designated path and adding them in myself but alas I do not need to! The cookie dough was not exciting in taste. It really didn’t have much flavor, almost tasted eggy, I was missing that deep chocolate flavor.
The next step was to roll the cookie dough into tablespoon sized balls but this dough was so sticky, there was no way I was going to attempt to roll the cookies out. However, they did finally write the instructions “If the dough is too sticky to roll, cover and refrigerate 30 minutes” on the package. I feel like these new seasonal Betty Crocker mixes have been a step above their regular mixes by adding a refrigeration step and multiple baking temperatures. I hope they continue down this path and bring us better instructions that bake good quality desserts. I did not use the optional refrigeration step however because of the added powdered sugar step. Using my tablespoon sized scoop, I scooped a ball of dough out into a bowl of powdered sugar and rolled it around until it was fully coated. The dough was still sticky and stuck to my scoop so I coated the scoop in powdered sugar before making each dough ball and that worked really well. I got a total of 24 cookies scooped out and rolled in powdered sugar.
As I mentioned, we were graced with the option of two baking temperatures so I used the lower temp which was 325f. I put the cookies in the oven, one pan at a time. The mix instructions claim they will bake for 13-15 minutes but since I don’t trust Betty Crocker to tell the truth, I started checking at 10 minutes to see if they were cooked and found 12 minutes to be the sweet spot for both batches to be baked properly with set edges and soft centers.
These cookies baked beautifully, they crackled apart nicely and held a good shape. These cookies were tasty and while warm, the centers almost seemed brownie like. The flavor wasn’t deeply chocolatey or impressive, to me I could tell this came from a box, but it really hit the spot. It was absolute a chocolate cookie with chocolate chips and it was so soft. The kind of soft that only comes from a box mix and will stay soft for weeks. These hit the spot and are a really good shortcut for your Christmas cookie platter when you know you’ll be baking too many cookies to count. I definitely recommend picking this mix up while you can since it is limited edition for the holiday season.
This mix as prepared totaled 2360 calories. If divided into 24 cookies each is 98 calories.
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