These snickerdoodles were made with a cake mix. Yesterday I reviewed The Cake Mix Doctor Bakes Gluten-Free and I said that there’d be a follow-up post with photos of the recipe I made from that cookbook. Here it is.
For these cookies I used Bob’s Red Mill vanilla cake mix. The original recipe uses yellow cake mix (in the cookbook Anne Byrn explains she narrowed down the kinds of cake mixes to yellow and chocolate for convenience and flexibility), which I tried looking for at all my local stores and could not find one. Vanilla was the closest I could get and to be honest, it took care of the tablespoon of vanilla extract originally called for; I ended up using 1/2 teaspoon, though in retrospect I think I could have even left it out and the cookies would still taste good. I also replaced the sugar in the recipe with 2 tablespoons of honey.
Update: I used a quarter amount of the butter (8 tablespoons or 1 stick) called for in the recipe, as I noted on Twitter, and the cookies still worked out beautifully. I weighed the amount I used, which was 2.4 ounces or 68 to 70 grams (my scale kept fluctuating between those numbers).
The dough was quickly pulled together using a food processor. I make nearly everything by hand, without the use of appliances, but for once I followed a recipe to use a food processor and it was blissful to just put everything in and pulse it until dough formed.
May I mention also that this recipe, as I’m sure with all the other recipes in The Cake Mix Doctor Bakes Gluten-Free, is very child friendly. My brother helped scoop the dough and space the balls on the pan (with a new cookie scoop my grandmother gave me for my birthday) and prompted me to take photos. Those are his hands you see in the photos above. He was also an eager participant to eat the cookies once they had cooled. I’m sure he ate most of them – which is quite something, considering that this recipe made about 3 dozen cookies!
