Turning Pillsbury’s Red Velvet Cake Mix into Cookies

There are so many cake mix hacks on the internet, they range from making a cake out of just box mix and a soda, to elevating the box mix to taste even better. On Pillsbury’s official baking Instagram account, they shared a video and a recipe hack that turns their red velvet cake mix and cream cheese frosting into a frosted cookie. The fact that it was promoted on their official page means it must be promising. Red velvet is one of my top favorite flavors for cake so let’s see how it goes when we turn it into cookies!

The recipe for these cookies is simpler than the recipe to make this into cake, you only need 1/2 cup of oil and 2 eggs. I combined everything and it came together as a nice cookie dough, not too soft and not too stiff. It tasted exactly as you would expect, like red velvet. Using a 1 tablespoon sized cookie scoop, I got 22 cookies scooped out onto my baking sheets and put them in the oven at 375f to bake. The recipe calls for 10-11 minutes but I found that they were baked and ready at 8 minutes. It seems the poor bake time suggestions continued beyond the box instructions.

I placed the baked cookies on a cooling rack and let them sit for while. Once all cookies were completely cooled, I moved onto the frosting. I started by putting the Pillsbury cream cheese icing into a piping bag (you can also use one corner of a ziploc bag here) and then I tried to recreate the look they had shown in their video. It looked like an easy swirl design so I just cut a small hole into the bottom of the piping bag and then started in the center and circled the frosting over and over until it mostly covered the cookie. This process was pretty easy but I don’t think it was necessary. You could easily leave these cookies unfrosted or just use a spatula to spread the icing on top if you don’t want to bother with piping the frosting.

As suggested in the recipe, I left two cookies unfrosted and crumbled them up. I think it’s a really funny practice that red velvet is so commonly found with crumbled up red velvet on top. Other desserts get fun toppings like chocolate chips or coconut or nuts, but traditionally, red velvet is covered with crushed up red velvet. Sticking to tradition, I used the crumbled cookies to top the frosted cookies. This was a nice touch, it really elevated the appearance of these cookies. You’d never know they were from a box mix just looking at them.

These cookies weren’t just pretty, but they were also tasty. They smelled and tasted very much like the Pillsbury shaped sugar cookies that come out each holiday such as ghosts and snowmen. The outside had a nice crispness to it but the inside was soft and not very cake like which I had feared. It was a cookie consistency and a really good one. I couldn’t tell these were from a box mix. I didn’t love the frosting however. There was a weird taste to it and it just didn’t come across as very cream cheesy. It paired nicely with the cookie but I don’t recommend it alone. The frosting was very soft when it went onto the cookie but it firmed up after a bit which proved to be a much better consistency on these cookies. I highly recommend giving this recipe a try. This could be the perfect holiday cookie if you have a need for one this holiday season. For Christmas you could even dye the frosting green and add festive sprinkles on top, I think it would look great and with little effort you could really impress friends and family with these cookies.

This cookie dough totals 2700 calories. Divided into 22 cookies each is 122 calories. I used half of the tub of frosting, 910 calories, spread out onto 20 cookies, which makes the frosted cookies 167.5 calories each.