Tag Archives: cake mix cookies

Short Days, Long Nights Thursday Rundown

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After a break from the Thursday Rundown due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I am back with five random topics! So while this month of December is still young, let’s get started…

Nativity Galore – Last night, we found ourselves at the LDS Church at 14111 E. 16th Ave. for its Nativity Nights event. More than 150 nativity sets from around the world were featured along with an actual live nativity. After we passed Mary and Joseph holding baby Jesus, we were given hot coco. Much in the same totally organic way that I found out about the magical Surfside Beach live nativity eight years ago, a small sign at an intersection alerted me to the one we attended yesterday evening. It truly was the perfect Advent activity.

Some photos from last evening’s Nativity Nights event.

Writing To Santa – Each year, I encourage my kids to write to Santa. Sloan is at an age where she can write her letter by herself and doesn’t even need her spellchecker dad by her side. Beau? Well, any disappointment from my daughter’s dismissal of my assistance is extinguished by my son’s reliance on me to pen his note. Although I jot down what he tells me to write, he handles all the illustrations. That is what you see him doing in the below photo.

Beau writing his letter to Santa.

Newest Cake Mix Cookie Flavor – I have written before about one of my favorite kinds of cookies to bake. Trust me, if you have never made cake mix cookies before you are truly missing out. In that blog post, I mentioned that I like to experiment with different flavors and I made good on that claim this past weekend. I whipped up white chocolate coconut cookies. It only took a box of Dolly Parton coconut cake mix and white chocolate chips to make these morsels of goodness. Although my wife and kids gave the treats an underwhelming review, I thought they were chef’s kiss.

The kids helped me make these coconut white chocolate cookies.

Thanksgiving Meal Time – I couldn’t help but entertain this question when it came across my feed on X. My opinion? I don’t think there is a bad time to eat the Thanksgiving meal. We ate at 4 p.m. this year which is custom for my side of the family. Last year, when we were with Sidney’s family, we ate at noon. The one advantage to eating late morning/noon is that you can bust out the leftovers that same day when you re-heat things for a late dinner.

This was a fair question.

Holiday Vibes – Downtown Spokane always does a fantastic job at diving headfirst into the holiday spirit and it is always especially evident at River Park Square. The mall is always decorated in such a classy way and its main centerpiece—the 50-foot-tall Christmas tree—will even bring the biggest Scrooge some Yuletide joy. I personally love bringing my kids downtown during the holidays.

Beau and Sloan in River Park Square. It is always so well-decorated.

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I believe that will wrap things up for tonight. Just a reminder, my top five songs of 2024 will drop next week so prepare yourself for that 😂. Have a terrific weekend! Don’t Blink.

Cake Mix S’mores Cookies

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One of my mom’s signature Thanksgiving dishes is her famous sweet potato balls. She boils the potatoes and mixes them with brown sugar and butter. She then does something truly innovative: My mom adds a marshmallow. She forms the potatoes around the fluffy desserts and then runs the balls through a graham cracker mixture. They are delicious!

Well, you can put a marshmallow in other delicacies too. If you are my friend, you have likely enjoyed some of my cake mix cookies. In a blog post I wrote in 2023, I expressed how I am constantly pushing myself to evolve my favorite baked item. Thanks to inspiration from an Instagram Reel, my mom’s sweet potato balls, and a suggestion from my wife, we created something new in the Reser kitchen on Saturday night.

These are the ingredients we used to make our cake mix s’mores cookies.

About a week ago, I watched a Reel from the Pillsbury Instagram account that showed how to make marshmallow-stuffed cookies using its vanilla cake mix. Based on how delicious the cookies looked combined with past experience eating other yummy marshmallow-based recipes (i.e. sweet potato balls), I knew I wanted to give these a try. When I pitched the recipe to Sid, she gave me one piece of advice: add chocolate chips to the batter and make it a true s’mores cookie. GENIUS!

Sloan mixing our cake mix s’mores cookie dough.

Okay, back to Saturday night. Thanks to help from my sous-chef, Sloan, we baked our cake mix s’mores cookies. We mixed the cake mix, two eggs, and a ½ cup of vegetable oil in a bowl. After stirring it to create dough, we added in chocolate chips. We then placed balls of the dough on a baking sheet. From there, we used a spoon to make indents in the middle of the unbaked cookies. We placed a marshmallow in each indent and then covered it up with additional dough. We then popped the baking sheet in the oven for 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

A photo during the marshmallow-stuffing stage.

These cookies turned out really nice! After pulling them out of the oven we let them sit for about 15 minutes. When the time came to test them, we dug in with forks as they were still a little gooey. But gooey or not, they were GOOD…and also really rich. After we each had one, we were satisfied.

A look at what the cookies looked like right out of the oven.

Our cake mix s’mores cookies were even better Sunday morning. After church we ate another one, this time not using any utensils. The cookies had cooled completely overnight and the marshmallow was completely entrenched in the cookie. It was a lot of fun to take a cookie from each end and pull it gently as it would stretch several inches thanks to the marshmallow. So good!

Sloan handling a cake mix s’mores cookie the morning after baking them.

If you want to attempt this recipe, let me reiterate that these cookies are rich and on the bigger size. Any child would be satisfied (and perhaps pretty full) after eating one. August is a big month for s’mores and what better way to celebrate than to make our cake mix s’mores cookies? Don’t Blink.

Cereal Killer Thursday Rundown

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Happy Friday Eve! Compared to August and September, this month has seemed to fly by for me. Less than two weeks until Halloween. Let’s get started with tonight’s five topics…

Cerealflation – Let me vent for a minute. What you see below is ridiculous and nothing short of highway robbery. The fact that Safeway had the nerve to put a tag underneath those cereal boxes and associate it with a promotion makes me even angrier. How in good conscience can any retailer try to sell a small box of cereal for $6.99? Out of all the products I have seen impacted by inflation and greed over the past couple years, this takes the cake (or the cereal bowl). I will continue to buy our family’s cereal from Grocery Outlet at $.99 per box.

Listen right now: I will NOT pay almost $7 for a box of cereal.

ONE Stadium – On Friday night I took the kids to ONE Stadium, the brand new sports facility that Spokane District 81 built for its schools. Located smack in the middle of downtown, we visited the stadium to watch my alma mater Mead High School play Lewis and Clark High School. Although my Panthers fell short, we still had fun exploring the stadium. Perhaps the coolest feature is the magical scales that you put your concession items on. Once the items are placed, the accurate price is automatically reflected on the screen. Can’t wait to see the epic sporting events that ONE Stadium will hold over the many years to come.

A few photos from our first visit to Spokane’s ONE Stadium, including the scale that instantly tabulated your total.

Cookie Sandwiches – On Tuesday night I decided to whip up a treat for our Engaged Encounter meeting. I opted for chocolate cookie sandwiches. I baked the cookies with my famous cake mix recipe and then put vanilla frosting in the middle. They were a hit as not a single crumb was left.

I baked these for our Engaged Encounter meeting.

Trick-Or-Treat Chart – As we draw closer to Halloween I am sure many of you are starting to stock up on the candy you will pass out to trick-or-treaters. I thought that as you make your candy selections that I would re-share this “How Kids Judge Halloween” graphic that originally appeared in my blog five years ago. It always brings a smile to my face. The category that Sidney and I fall under? None of them! The past few years we have gone over to my parents’ house and helped them pass out candy to the nearly 300 trick-or-treaters who come to their door on any given Halloween. My mom definitely represents “The Trusty Provider” category.

This chart is golden.

Way Too Extreme – I love a good haunted house. Over the years I have heard about these “extreme” haunted houses that require you to sign a waiver and last for hours. It kind of appealed to me but not after the documentary I watched on Hulu this week. Called “Monster Inside: America’s Most Extreme Haunted House,” the film tells the story of the house of horrors that deranged Russ McKamey created. What the “experience” amounted to was Russ basically torturing the people who signed up to do it. There is absolutely no connection to Halloween or anything that resembles a classic haunted house. You won’t believe it until you watch the documentary…I don’t approve.

This documentary was disturbing.

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That will conclude things for this evening. Please continue to pray for peace in the Holy Land and all other war-torn areas. Don’t Blink.

Cake Mix Cookies

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I don’t know where this recipe has been all my life, but I am mildly obsessed with cake mix cookies. Wait, you didn’t know you could use your favorite boxed cake mix to bake cookies? Or are you just rolling your eyes at my stupidity of recently figuring it out?

Sloan and Beau both love cake mix cookies.

Anyway, making them is a piece of cake (pun intended). You just need cake mix, ½ cup of vegetable oil, and two eggs. If you are more of a visual learner, you can watch the TikTok video I made. After you have your batter spaced out on your cookie sheet all you need to do is pop them in the oven for 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

I recently made rainbow confetti cake mix cookies. You just need cake mix, vegetable oil, and two eggs.

Perhaps it is just the novelty of it all, but I prefer cake mix cookies over the cookies produced from actual cookie mixes. They keep a better texture and are satisfyingly moister than cookie mixes. Cake mix cookies are also larger and softer. What’s not to like?

These cake mix cookies are delicious right out of the oven.

You can get creative with your cake mix cookies. An assortment of flavors come in cake mixes that you can’t find in cookie mixes. Take for example the strawberry cake mix cookies I made below. When have you ever seen a strawberry cookie mix? You can also add fun mix-ins. These cookies below have white chocolate chips that I added.

These were Chef’s Kiss!

I am so high on these cookies that we made them for our neighbors during Christmas. Not only did they receive our Christmas Trash mix, but we included confetti cake cookies as well. I have also brought them to our Young Adult Catholic group, served them at my parents’ Super Bowl party, and allowed my children to make them with me.

These were my strawberry white chocolate chip cookies right when I took them out of the oven.

If you are in the need of a new treat to bake that is quick and super inexpensive, consider cake mix cookies. I hope you love them as much as me. Don’t Blink.