The Bubbly Ingredient Your Boxed Cake Mix Needs For An Easy Batch Of Fluffy Cookies

Picture it: you're having a lazy day at home when a total snack attack emergency takes place. Only something sweet will curb the ravenous demands of your belly, but you have no cookies in the house. Your eyes lock on that dusty box of cake mix sitting in the pantry. Insert the sound of a record-scratch. If you have boxed cake mix and a can of soda, you may have fluffy, soft cookies in no time. No cap, no kidding.

Enterprising home cooks have known for decades that the combination of pop and cake mix is a quick-and-dirty hack for a moist, airy cake minus the eggs and oil. The carbonation in the soda acts as an additional leavening agent for the cake, for one. What's more, you probably already know you can use cake flour to bake cookies that are super soft and crumbly. Well, baking cookies with cake mix containing that flour and canned soda works just as well.

Baking cookies from scratch is sometimes a fraught process — there are tons of mistakes you can make baking chocolate chip cookies, and that's just one variety. Cake box cookies, however, are almost foolproof. A little discernment is necessary when it comes to mixing, but the trial-and-error process to get your methodology perfect is bound to be delicious.

To make these cookies, you need one box of cake mix and approximately ¾ of one can of soda. You may require a little extra splash to get the right consistency — this is where your discernment comes in. If you've baked cookies before, you should have a fair idea of what the dough ought to look like: moist and malleable, neither sticky nor crumbly. If you're not quite there yet, add a bit of that extra soda at a time until you achieve the right texture (try not to overmix). 

Drop rounded spoonfuls of the dough onto a prepared cookie sheet, and bake in a preheated oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 8-10 minutes. Voila! That's it. (While you can definitely bake traditional cookies in the air fryer, this is probably not the cookie recipe to try with this particular hack.)

One of the most fun parts of whipping up a batch of cookies from boxed cake mix and a can of soda is getting mixy-matchy with the flavors. Chocolate cake and Coca-Cola go together like PB&J, obviously, but you can think a little further outside the box. How about ginger ale with carrot cake, or cream soda and vanilla? There are tons of canned sodas and even more varieties of boxed cake mix. The combinations are near-endless. These cakey cookies are also absolutely heavenly with a bit of frosting, whether canned or homemade.