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.