Cake Mix Pudding Cookies - The Creek Line House (2024)

These cake mix pudding cookies are the perfect “plain” cookies, for all of the simple cookie lovers in your life! They look boring, but they taste amazing!

OK, this cake mix pudding cookies recipe may sound a little “out there,” but hear me out. You see, Chris insists that he loves only “plain” cookies. No chips, no nuts, no flashy sprinkles, or fluffy icing. Nothing. Just cookie. And it can be pretty dang near impossible to make an amazing-tasting cookie without adding anything to it unless the stars align just right, and the humidity is perfect, and your oven really loves you that day. Usually, some get burnt, or the texture is a little off, or they turn out just OK. Let me tell you, though, these cake mix and pudding cookies get it right every single time. Cake batter cookies mixed with a basic packet of instant pudding just have the perfect chewy-to-crispness ratio, and they have some weird ability to resist burning even when I leave them in the oven a little too long by accident. I’m telling you, whether you call them pudding cookies, cake box cookies, or cake mix cookies, this recipe is a gift.

And they even have the much-coveted perfect cookie crinkle!

Ingredients Needed for the Cake Mix Cookies Recipe

There’s a good chance you may have everything you need to make this easy dessert hanging around somewhere in the back of your baking cupboard!

You’ll need:

• A box of store-bought cake mix. Either white cake mix, vanilla, yellow, or golden cake mix will be perfect.
• A box of vanilla instant pudding
• Eggs or a plant-based substitute
• Salted butter or a plant-based substitute

Here’s a photo of the cookies made with yellow cake mix. All the other cookies pictured in this post were made using a white cake mix.

Recipe Notes for Cookies Made From Cake Mix

I feel like the salted butter is important because of the sweetness of the other ingredients. It really helps balance everything out. If you don’t have salted butter, just use unsalted and add a pinch of salt to your dry cake mix before you incorporate the other ingredients into the cookie dough.

Most cake mixes are usually vegan, so if you’d like to avoid using dairy and eggs so that these can be shared with all your plant-based friends and family members, just use plant-based substitutes where it’s mentioned in the ingredient list above and use a vegan pudding mix, which is quite easy to find now.

Although I love a good three-ingredient recipe and the idea of 3 ingredient pudding cookies sounds great to me, I definitely think this recipe works out best when all the ingredients are used. It’s still nice to have an option to avoid fussing with flour, baking soda, and vanilla extract when you’re in a real hurry.

Here’s the full printable recipe. Use it on your phone or tablet, or print it off for your recipe binder so you can always remember how to make cookies out of cake mix when you need a good shortcut.

I should have added that the final step is really to gasp in amazement at the sheer perfection of this cookie. It’s soft and chewy, perfectly sweet, and so incredibly simple to throw together.

You’ll gasp in amazement again the next day when you find that you weren’t the only one who ate these! At least, you will if you’re like me and you have a family who often only likes the most classic, plain cookies, and rarely shows any interest in your more experimental cookie recipes.