Oh I so have a fun recipe for you all today! Hmm...Now that I think of it, I find most recipes fun. Well, except for that 48 step brioche I baked one year for our Christmas Captain Crunch French Toast, but that's another post entirely.
Anyway, yesterday was the culmination of spooky (or is it spoopy 
Nope, this is a post about cookies and the party they were baked for, because that is what happened here on the farm yesterday. For the last couple of years my kids wanted to have a Halloween party instead of trick or treating. I was fully on board with this plan because it meant that I didn't have to go anywhere. Woo! Also, it meant that I could craft delectable comestibles for my kids and their friends to inhale like a biblical plague of locusts.
Yesterday's party was especially awesome because I also got to abandon the heathens for a bit and head down the road to my friend M's house for a party of my own. Since my friend's kids were all coming to the party at my house, we decided to have an adult soup and stew round the campfire fest at her place while the kids invaded mine. I love it when a plan comes together.
So while I ate bowls of white chicken chili, homemade cream of chicken noodle soup, and green tomato stew with sweet potato biscuits next to a campfire down the way, the kids were ingesting all manner of foodstuffs at their party at my place, including the subject of this post, the monster cookies!
Now, making party snacks for 20 teenagers is a bit of a task, and as long suffering readers of my blog know, sometimes I feel a bit lazy. I suppose I might not actually be lazy, but I tend to have a habit of doing ten days worth of things in one day, thus recipes like cake mix cookies are lifesavers!
My classic cake mix cookie recipe is 1 box of cake mix, two large eggs, and a 1/2 cup of oil. Mix, shape, bake, and repeat as needed. But this was for a party so I decided to amp up the glitz a bit when it came to the cookies.
Due to the volume of adolescents showing up, I also doubled the recipe. Before you could say double dishwasher load I had my dough whipped up.
Here's a non pro tip for ya'll: when it comes to dying your baked goods, I wholeheartedly recommend gel food coloring. Sure the old stain your hands for thirty days watery food coloring will do the trick, but I really dig the bright, bold colors you achieve with the gel coloring. Cause Kat's very much admire and get easily distracted by pretty colors....
Anyway, after I colored the cookie dough the shade of a sherbet shaded pumpkin I got out a jar of Halloween colored sprinkles that have been lurking in my cupboards for a hot minute. I measured out the little non-pareils and sacrificed them to the orange dough monster. It was then time to put the monster into the oven.
While cookies were baking, and because I was feeling extra festive, I gave my gigantic black cat Jager a very generous pinch of cat nip. He coated his fur in the nip like it was a dusting of oregano on a pizza crust. He also then proceeded to annihilate the kitchen step stool, it's nice for all to have a good time.
Normally I just plunk cookie dough onto prepared cookie sheets in an asymmetrical, I have to do something else right meow, blobs. Yesterday though, was a special occasion, so I rolled each chunk into perfect round pieces.
After baking I let the cookies rest on their parchment lined sheets for 3 minutes exactly before pressing in the most fun part of the process, the candy googly monster eyes. I love how they turned out!
And I made one extra special cookie just for me to nosh on, it had a milk chocolate chip mouth that really could use some dental work. Always happy to oblige, I set to work gnawing on the little monster. Cooks need indulgence sometimes too...
And I can happily report that all four dozen cookies have disappeared, imagine that?!
Cake Mix Monster Cookies For A Crowd
2 boxes white cake mix
4 large eggs
1 cup of vegetable oil (melted butter will work too)
1/4 cup Halloween sprinkles
orange gel food color
candy eyesLine a giant cookie sheet or a couple standard sized ones with parchment paper.
Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit
Mix cake mixes, oil, and eggs well until dough forms. Then add food coloring and mix until dough is fully colored.
Next mix in the sprinkles. Place Tablespoons of rounded dough onto lined baking sheets and bake for 9-11 minutes.
Let cookies set on baking sheets for 3 minutes, then press in candy eyeballs before removing to a baking rack to fully cool.
Enjoy!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's orange dyed little monster of an iPhone.