Hot Stuff!!

 

So…what’s the best thing to do when it’s a million degrees outside and all you want to do is sit in front of a fan and drink iced coffee??? You crank up the oven to 350° and bake cookies, of course!

 

I found this super easy cookie recipe online a couple of years ago and made some great chocolate cookies with it for Christmas. It was the winter. No prob. It calls for only 3 ingredients: boxed cake mix, tub of cool whip and 1 egg. The next time I was at the store I picked up a strawberry cake mix. I really wanted lemon, but they didn’t have that. I also got a tub of cool whip. Those two items languished in the pantry cabinet/freezer for almost 2 years! I finally decided I really needed to use up that cake mix soon, and I had no idea what the cool whip looked like after being hidden in the icy wasteland that I call the freezer.

 

The cake mix looked fine, as did the cool whip after I thawed it. So…even though it was a million degrees outside…I baked those cookies. And while this recipe is easy, it is extremely sticky! Be warned!

 

Basic recipe: 1 boxed cake mix, any flavor, 1 8oz. tub cool whip, 1 egg. Mix together and drop by teaspoonfuls in powdered sugar (OK, there’s another ingredient, making it 4. So sue me).

 

Place on cookie sheet on parchment paper. Bake 350° for 12-15 minutes. They will be very soft at first. Let cool before removing from cookie sheet.

 

Now for the sticky part…and I mean REALLY sticky. After it’s all mixed up you WILL get it all over your fingers when working with it. What I do is have a small bowl of powdered sugar with a teaspoon in it. I’ll take a spoonful of dough (with another spoon) and scrape it off into the sugar. Then I take the clean spoon in the sugar and spoon it all over the cookie, using the spoon to flip it over and get completely coated. THEN you can pick up the cookie and place it on the cookie sheet. They will spread a bit, but not much while cooking. Most of the labor is scooping out the dough and covering it with the powdered sugar.

 

Now for another tip: be careful when removing the sheet from the oven. I found out that parchment paper is VERY slippery and if the sheet is tilted at all, the whole piece will slide right out and onto the floor. This happened with the first batch because I was using a cookie sheet that had no sides. I immediately learned my lesson. No one’s tossing cookies on MY watch…