Trying out Pillsbury’s – Funffetti – Elf of the Shelf Hot Cocoa Cookie mix

Christmas cookie season is my favorite season, I always overdo it and end up baking 10 or more varieties of cookies and gifting them to friends, family, and even acquaintances because I make way too many. I always intend to make less but there are too many good cookies that only come out once a year, I can’t help myself, cookie gifting is basically a love language. However, when I’m in the middle of it and I’ve been on my feet all day in a hot kitchen, I will happily take any shortcut to get the cookies finished sooner. We are starting a bit early on the Christmas cookie box mixes because you and I both need to know which ones are a hit and which are a miss before it is time to start officially making and sharing Christmas cookies.

We are starting this season out with a Hot Cocoa cookie mix. This is a product from Pillsbury under their line “Funfetti” and it is under Funfetti’s line “Elf on the Shelf” so I’m not really sure what brand name to list this under. The packaging is cute and covered in elf on the shelf and shows a chocolate cookie with white bits, maybe marshmallows, and red sprinkles. I make a variety of a hot cocoa cookie each year so I am excited to try this mix and see how it holds up.

The back of the box is covered in some fun cutouts that are designed to be left out for your elf on the shelf to bake cookies with. The instructions are actually on the side of the box and very simple. You need 1 stick of butter and 1 egg. You’ll combine these ingredients with the mix until you have a cookie dough. At first glance I worried the mix-ins weren’t included but they were hiding in the powdered mix and were visible once all the cookie dough was mixed together. The white bits were actually hard and tasted more like white chocolate than a marshmallow. The dough tasted artificial, I couldn’t put my finger on what it tasted like but it wasn’t very chocolatey or very hot cocoa like.

Using a 1 tablespoon sized scoop, I scooped out dough balls and got 21 when the box claims to make 24. I felt like you couldn’t really see the mix ins at all a this point and it just resembled a chocolate cookie. I put the pan into the oven to bake at 375f. The box claims they should bake for 8-12 minutes but I found they were fully baked at 7 minutes. Unfortunately, I have come to expect this from Pillsbury, I’ve never seen an accurate bake time from them. After letting the cookies cool, they flattened out quiet a bit and the mix-ins became slightly more visible but you could only see them on a couple of the cookies, not all of them.

These cookies are very flat and the mix-ins are still hard to see and overall it’s kind of an ugly cookie. But looks are hardly important when compared to taste. The taste of these cookies is decent. It’s a simple chocolate with white chocolate chunks. It’s not a hot cocoa cookie and when I remove it from that category, it’s actually an alright cookie. The chocolate flavor is just a bit weak, it didn’t wow me, and I felt there was an after taste that was just artificial tasting. I don’t love this cookie and I wouldn’t buy it again but I did share and other people did enjoy this cookie so I won’t say it’s a bad cookie or anything, but this cookie mix won’t be replacing my homemade hot cocoa cookies.

This cookie mix as prepared totals 2230 calories and if divided into 21 cookies they are 106 calories each.