Name: Chocolate Gingerbread Crinkles
Prep time: 5 min
Cook time: 12 min
Total time: 17 min
Ingredients: 1 box Devil's Food chocolate cake mix; 1 large egg (lightly beaten); 8 ounces whipped topping (such as Cool Whip, or use 4 oz heavy cream to whip your own); 3 Tablespoons molasses; 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon; 1 teaspoon ground ginger; 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves; 1/2 teaspoon salt; 1 cup powdered sugar

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Chocolate gingerbread crinkle cookies are made with just a few simple pantry ingredients, and one of them is a boxed chocolate cake mix! These cake mix cookies just may become on of your favorite easy cookie recipes!

Wait. What?!

Yes. I used a boxed cake mix. Please don’t judge.

I’m guessing that some of you have your jaws to the floor right now, shaking your head at the thought of a formally trained chef using a convenience product that’s loaded with unnecessary and unwanted chemicals. That’s perfectly okay. It’s a fact that I bake from scratch 99 percent of the time these days. But that wasn’t always the case.

When I first started culinary school, I used convenience boxed mixes a lot. My 4th of July patriotic cupcakes are from a boxed mix and the strawberry banana cupcakes recipe uses one, too. The convenience is too good to pass up, especially for a busy college student.

Cake mix cookies often lack flavor, but doctoring up a cake mix with extra flavor is easy. The reason this recipe is made with a mix is because it’s not actually my recipe.

This chocolate gingerbread crinkle cookies recipe comes from Amy, at Amy’s Cooking Adventures.

She and I are swapping holiday cookie recipes as part of the 3rd Annual Christmas Cookie Recipe Swap, hosted by my sweet friend Julie, from White Lights on Wednesday.

Julie had some help from great co-hosts, too!

COHOSTS

Aubrey from Real Housemoms

Rachel from {i love} my disorganized life

Wendy from Around My Family Table

Laura from Pink Cake Plate

Abbey from The Cards We Drew

Kelley from Miss Information

Carli from Dimple Prints

Easy Cookie Recipes: Chocolate Gingerbread Crinkle Cookies - This is a 5 ingredient Christmas cookie recipe, made from a boxed cake mix!

When Amy sent me her favorite Christmas cookie recipe, for Colorful Crinkle Cookies, I got excited, because I love crinkle cookies! You may remember that I made a low carb version of crinkles a couple of weeks ago.
After the excitement, I read the recipe and suddenly got a bit nervous, because as pretty as they are (and they’re stunning… take a look!), Amy’s recipe calls for a boxed cake mix, Cool Whip, and artificial food coloring. I’ve stopped using all of those items at one point or another over the past 2 years.

I didn’t want to stray from her recipe too much though, so I used a boxed cake mix and Cool Whip for this recipe. Unfortunately, food coloring makes me so sick that I simply can’t eat it anymore, so I adapted the recipe to be flavored after one of my favorite Christmas cookies, gingerbread.

Overall, I think I did a pretty decent job of adapting the recipe to my needs. These cookies are moist, chewy, and packed with the flavors of chocolate gingerbread. Then they’re rolled in powdered sugar and baked, just as any good crinkle cookie should be.

It doesn’t get easier than a cake mix cookie. Enjoy these chocolate gingerbread crinkles!