Chocolate Gooey Butter Cookies

Adapted from Paula's Home Cooking

These are not the best tasting cookies, but by far the simplest recipe I've seen. Weighing cost and benefit, this recipe is a good deal.

What you need

8 oz cream cheese

1 stick of butter

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp instant espresso/coffee powder

1 box Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Dark Chocolate Fudge Cake mix

Powder sugar


0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
1. Cream the butter and cheese with an electric mixer until smooth.

2. Beat in egg.

3. Add the vanilla, coffee, and cake mix. I added coffee to Paula's original recipe to bring out more of the chocolate flavor, but I'm using Sanka (decaf) because my toddler is going to be eating it.

4. Cover and chill in refrigerator for 2 hours. Shape into balls and roll in powder sugar. Bake 12 minutes and cool completely before serving.

The 2 hours are perfect for a toddler's nap! We used a mini-ice cream scoop to make the balls as uniform as possible, but no matter how we tried, the powder sugar process was quite messy...