This recipe was given to me by my aunt in Michigan originally; she is an amazing cook. I just modified it a bit to make a thumbprint cookie out of it. There is a lot you can do with this cookie for one with so few ingredients – four! Egg, cream cheese, butter, and cake mix.
To make the thumbprint cookie, I of course added one more ingredient, jam.
You could use sooo many different kinds of cake mix tho. I use Butter, but you could use Yellow, Devil’s Food, or whatever your favorite is. You may want to add an extra egg for Devil’s Food since cocoa tends to create a dryer product unless more moisture/fat is added. You could also omit the thumbprint and sprinkle with colored sugar. Red and/or green sprinkled cookies are especially pretty at Christmas 🙂
A note on the brand of cake mix. I have been told for as long as I can remember that I should buy stock in Duncan Hines. They have received lots of free advertising from me over the years. When I buy a mix, that’s all I buy. Unless you have found a cake mix that is as consistently moist as Duncan Hines, if you use a different brand of cake mix for this recipe, I recommend adding an extra egg for moisture.
You just mix the ingredients together, refrigerate for an hour, drop them out onto parchment lined cookie sheets, and bake. For thumbprints, I baked them for 7 minutes, pulled them out, used a round 1/2 teaspoon measure to make a nice dip in them, and put in about a 1/2 teaspoon of slightly warmed jam.
I then returned them to the oven for about 3 minutes and pulled them out.
For blue and gold cookies for cubscouts, I used a pureed homemade fresh blueberry pie filling for the thumbprint 🙂
Ingredients:
1 extra large egg
1 butter-flavored cake mix (I prefer Duncan Hines by far)
1 package (8 oz, 114 g) cream cheese (Neufchatel ok; this has less fat than regular cream cheese.)
1/2 stick (2 oz, 57 g) butter
1/4 c. (80 g) raspberry jam, or whatever flavor you like
Directions:
1) Cream together cream cheese and butter using either a wooden spoon or the flat beater attachment on a stand mixer.
2) Add in cake mix and egg and continue mixing. Once thoroughly mixed, cover with wrap and refrigerate for an hour.
3) Preheat oven to 350F (177C). While preheating, drop cookies onto a parchment lined cookie sheet using either a cookie scoop or knife and spoon.
4) Bake for 7 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat jam either in pyrex cup in warm water or in a microwave. You just need to warm it enough to drop it by spoon into the cookies. Do not liquify it 🙂
5) If making thumbprint cookies: After 7 minutes, pull the cookies out. They may have a few brown tips on the cookies here and there, but will not have much. Use a 1/2 teaspoon measuring spoon to make a little dip in the middle of them. Add in warmed jam. I found it easier to use a 1/4 teaspoon measure to do this, having it nicely rounded so I was really putting in slightly under 1/2 of a teaspoon of jam into each cookie.
If _not_ making thumbprints, do not pull them out until they are done, after about 10 minutes.
6) Put the cookies back in the oven for 3 minutes.
7) Pull the cookies out of the oven and cool on a rack. They’re bottoms should be a nice golden brown, but the tops will just have a few brown tips.
These are a very different cookie for some people since they’re yellow, but one bite of this soft, flavorful cookie and they’ll be won over 🙂
thebakingbooth 