Chocolate Crinkle Cake Mix Cookies

No holiday cookie swap is complete without chocolate crinkle cookies. And while nothing beats a made-from-scratch cookie, there’s a shortcut to homestyle crinkle cookies right there in the baking aisle that will fool even the most discerning chocolate cookie connoisseurs.

Maintain your sanity during this baking season with the help of a boxed cake mix. It contains the flour, sugar, leavening, chocolate, and some fats, greatly minimizing the mess that comes with measuring. Any chocolate cake mix will work, but Devil’s Food cake mix makes cookies with the richest fudge flavor.

Disregard the package instructions and instead whisk together two large eggs and 1/2 cup of vegetable oil. Set a fine-mesh strainer over the bowl and sift in the cake mix. This step eliminates clumps (and no, they won’t disappear in the oven if you skip this step!) while aerating the mix, giving the cookies a more “homemade” appearance and texture.

If you have one, use a one-ounce ice cream scoop to portion the dough (a soup spoon works too!). Roll each round of dough in powdered sugar, then refrigerate for 15 to 20 minutes until chilled.

The cookies may absorb some of the sugar in the fridge, so if they aren’t fully coated when you pull them out, give them another tumble through the powdered sugar before you bake. You want them to be fully coated so that the sugar layer cracks in the heat of the oven, revealing a fudgy cookie surrounded by a generous dusting of sweet powdered sugar.