Friday, December 26, 2014

Minty Choco Chip Cake Mix Cookies

My previous recipe (Choco Cranberry Sauce Cake Mix Cupcakes) used cake mix powder that I sifted white and chocolate flavors together, using half of the mixture. This recipe uses the other half of the powder. My cooky recipes are almost all about using cake mixes because of convenience. Using cake mix in cooky making is more complex than using refrigerated cooky dough, but easier than blending soft butter into cooky powder mix. Furthermore, cake mixes come in more varieties and provide more options for the imagination.

Winter time seems to bring out inclinations for something minty. Do something different than chocolate chip cookies—make the chips mint! One year, I found mint-green chips, which I haven't seen lately. This year, I ran across Andes Creme de Menthe baking chips, which have chocolate and mint-green stripes. Did not know until now that Tootsie owns Andes.

Note: Both Tootsie and Amazon offer up Andes Creme de Menthe baking chips, but their prices are WAY more expensive than the local supermarket price.

Besides using chips with varying mint strengths, have the dough flavors meet in the middle—half vanilla-ey and half chocolatey. If you'd rather not commit to buying one box each of white and chocolate mixes, buy a marble cake mix and mix the powders together. My recipe for Diff Kinda Choco-chip Cake Mix Cookies includes marble cake mix, chocolate chips, and coconut.

Onto the recipe details!

My pixstrip shows the following image areas:
  1. Implements
  2. Ingredients
  3. Combo pic:
    1. Mixed eggs and oil
    2. Mixture of eggs, oil, and cake mix
    3. Dough, with chips stirred in
  4. Raw dough in pan
  5. Baked cookies in pan
  6. Flipped cookies on a cooling rack
  7. Cooled cookies on a plate
Implements
  • Cooky pan(s)
  • Pastry blender
  • Mixing bowl
  • Measuring cup
  • Spoon for measuring out cooky dough
  • Spatula for scraping dough onto pan
  • Cooky spatula to lift and transfer baked cookies (not shown—forgot for preprep pic)
  • Cooling rack for done cookies
Ingredients
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/3 cup oil
  • 1 box chocolatey cake mix (I used half fudgy chocolate and half white.)
  • 5 oz mint chips (I used Andes Creme de Menthe baking chips.)
  • 5 oz chocolate chips
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
  2. Combine the oil and eggs.
  3. Use the pastry blender to stir the cake mix powder into the wet ingredients.
  4. Stir the chips into the dough. (I might have saved a little energy if I had combined both kinds of chip together first.)
  5. Use a round tablespoon to scoop the dough. Shape to rounded, level, or concave height.
  6. Drop the spoon's dough onto the cooky sheet. (For slightly flatter cookies, slightly flatten the shaped dough rounds with the measuring cup.)
  7. Bake for about 9 to 10 minutes until the edges are lightly browned.
  8. Use the cooky spatula to lift and transfer the done cookies onto cooling rack.
The yield was 57 cookies, amounting to ~65 calories each. YMMV

Recipe Deviation Suggestions
If trying out this recipe, advanced deviations include the following modifications:
  • If you want to buy only one box of cake mix instead of two for making up half chocolatey and half white dough. buy marble cake mix and sift the powders together.
  • For more mintiness, use all mint chips instead of half mint and half chocolate chips. If you want to be really gutsy, you can add some mint extract into the wet ingredients before mixing the powders in.

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