Gooey Red Velvet Butter Cookies for The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap!

The tree is up, decorated and lit. Houses are decorated, Santa is in the mall and beautiful cards with warm wishes and adorable kiddies have started coming in the mail. Christmas season is upon us, which means the malls are packed and your credit card bill is probably through the roof, but it means something else too. It's baking season, which also means it's cookie swap time!

Still being fairly new to the world of blogging I have been amazed countless times at how involved food bloggers can truly become with one another. It's like our own little universe that you can't quote understand unless you're a part of it. That being said I participate in The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap for the first time ever, it really was a blast though I had the most difficult time deciding on which cookie I wanted to make and send out. Ultimately I decided to go with Red Velvet Gooey Cookies because 1. I just love anything red velvet and 2. they seemed to Christmasy to me. I thought the cookies came out amazing and my taste testers all agreed, so much so that I will likely be making them again soon.

Now technically these cookies are semi-homemade as you need to use cake mix for them. However, if you look up most gooey butter cake or cookie recipe you will see that this is the case. So I gave myself a pass on this one and am calling them homemade, you'll see when you make them. You'd never know you had any help from Duncan Hines with these bad boys, which was once again part of the Foodbuzz Tastemakers program. I hope my fellow cookie swappers loved them and I really look forward to doing the cookie swap again next year. Thank you again to Julie and Lindsay for setting this up. One more bit of exciting news is we made the papers! Check out the article about The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap here. Also if you're interested in participating in the cookie swap next year you can sign up to receive information here.

Gooey Red Velvet Butter Cookies
Yield: 4 dozen cookies
Prep Time: 20 minutes     I     Inactive Prep Time: 1 hour     I      Bake Time: 12 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 block (8 ounces) cream cheese at room temperature
• 6 tablespoons salted butter softened
• 1 egg
• 1 box Duncan Hines Red Velvet Cake Mix
• 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

To prepare the cookies start be preheating your oven to 350 degrees. 

In a stand mixer or using a hand mixer beat the butter and cream cheese until them are smooth. Next beat in the egg and vanilla and finally the cake mix. 

Transfer the bowl with the batter into the refrigerator for approximately 1 hour so the batter gets cold and very firm. Once that time is up remove the batter and form tablespoon sized balls of cookie dough and roll them in powdered sugar before transferring them to a greased baking sheet.

Bake the cookies for exactly 12 minutes, no more or less. Even though you may think they need another minute, cook them for 12 minutes only. Sprinkle the cookies with a little extra powdered sugar when they come out of the oven and enjoy.