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Soft Red Velvet Cream Cheese Crinkle Cookies

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I’m a sucker for red velvet cake. I can’t fully explain why. It’s really just a mild chocolate with a ton of red food coloring, but it’s so festive and beautiful, and it always comes with cheesecake icing. I know I’m not alone. Bakeries always seem to have red velvet cupcakes, red velvet doughnuts, red velvet marble pound cake. And apparently there’s a steady demand for red-velvet armadillo groom’s cakes (referencing the movie “Steel Magnolias”). So I know there are plenty more folks out there who can’t resist the stuff.
In fact, I’m such a sucker for red velvet cake that, on a whim, I bought a red velvet cake mix a few weeks ago at the grocery store. I’m not a big lover of store-bought mixes. (Except for Ghirardelli brownie mix, which to my mind makes better brownies than I have ever managed myself, if not the best I’ve ever tasted. Why mess with it?)

So when I saw a recipe on Pinterest for red velvet crinkle cookies, I was ready to try it. But there was a problem: no cream cheese. Anywhere. And seriously, what’s the point of red velvet without cream cheese? My first thought was simply to add a drizzle of cream-cheese icing, but as I was idly Googling I found a recipe on the Taste and Tell blog for “Red Velvet Gooey Butter Cookies” that incorporated cream cheese into the batter. Genius!

The recipe was simple and fun to put together. It’s a crinkle-style cookie, which means you get the fun of rolling each one in powdered sugar before baking for that distinctive look. The finished cookies are seductively soft, fluffy, and incredibly rich. The flavor of cream cheese comes through loud and clear, with chocolate as a supporting player – I amped up the chocolate flavor (often lacking in red velvet) with a little extra dose of cocoa.

These simple cookies are festively pretty crowd-pleasers – they’d be perfect for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, even the Fourth of July. Or any day you want a rich, easy-to-make mouthful to share with friends.

Soft Red Velvet Cream Cheese Crinkle Cookies
8 oz cream cheese, at room temperature
1/2 cup butter (1 stick), at room temperature
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1.5 tablespoons cocoa
1 box red velvet cake mix
Powdered sugar, for rolling
Use an electric mixer to cream together the cream cheese and butter. Beat the egg in thoroughly, then the vanilla and cocoa. Add the cake mix (discard the filling packet if your mix came with one). Combine thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate for an hour – two or more if you have time. This makes the dough less sticky and easier to handle.
Heat the oven to 350 and prepare cookie sheets with silicon baking sheets or parchment paper, or leave them ungreased.
Roll the chilled dough into equal-sized balls (mine were about a tablespoons and a half). Coat thoroughly with powdered sugar and place on baking sheets with at least 1/2 inch of room between them. Bake in the preheated oven for 12 minutes, or until fully set. Cool on a wire rack.

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Comments

  1. I haven’t tried them without the cocoa powder, but I don’t think it will make a big difference. The cookies will be less chocolaty, but I don’t think the amount is big enough to make any other real difference.

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