Here’s what I want you to do.
You’re in a city right?
Surrounded by lots of busy men in suits with serious faces rushing around from place to place while scrolling anxiously through their emails on their smart phones.
Find the most harried, most stressed, farthest from a smile one.
Now walk up to him and say one word.
Funfetti.
I dare that man not to crack a smile.
Funfetti.
The name itself is just happy. It’s fun. It’s rainbows and sunshine.
I mean, it’s rainbow sprinkles in a cake. And the Pilsbury Doughboy is on the box. And when you see him, you just have to think woo hoo!
Funfetti really is just vanilla cake with rainbow sprinkles inside. But for those of us of a certain generation, it’s so much more than that. It’s birthday parties and cupcakes you brought to school. It’s the smell of mom’s kitchen. It’s childhood. In a box.
You may already know my obsession with boxed cake mix.
I always buy it when it’s on sale because I like to be prepared in case I need to whip up a quick dessert, but also, because a homemade, from scratch cake, is not the same.
My boyfriend agrees.
I grew up baking Pilsbury or Betty Crocker cakes with my mom and grandma. They were easy, and more importantly, they were easy to make with a child.
Most of us have these cakes as our earliest kitchen memories because they were simple enough to assemble for mom to leave us to it. The mixing part at least.
Here, crack two eggs. Here pour in this water. Now add this oil. Ready? Here’s a spoon. Stir it up!
And you did. You stirred and stirred and stirred and stuck your finger in the batter and stirred and stirred and licked the spoon and stirred some more.
Mom or grandma would come along and help you pour the batter into the pan and put it in the oven.
But you did the hard part. You did the mixing. You made the cake. And once it cooled, you would get to do the finishing touches of adding the frosting.
Funfetti just looks like a cake a kid would make. An explosion of colors.
And because it’s bright and cheery, and because it always marked special occasions in our lives, it was the first thing that popped into my head when my boyfriend called me with good news.
He was getting a promotion at work!
That clearly called for Funfetti.
I didn’t feel like making a cake though.
So I was thrilled when I found a gem of a recipe for Funfetti cookies on the Pilsbury site. My last venture in cake batter cookies was a great success, so I jumped into this one too.
You will need
- 1 box Funfetti cake mix. (Yes you can use vanilla and just add sprinkles, but no it’s not the same. You need this box.
If you have to ask why, you will never understand. But you should call your mom and why she deprived you, why she never made you a Funfetti cake as a kid) - 2 eggs
- 1/3 cup vegetable oil
Preheat the oven to 375.
Pour the cake mix, eggs and oil into a bowl.
Grab the wooden spoon, and like when you were a kid, start mixing. The batter will form a dough ball.
Spoon out the dough onto a greased cookie sheet. I went with my usually golf to ping pong ball size dough blobs.
Bake for 11 minutes.
Okay. Mine took 11 minutes, but yours might not. 8-12 minutes let’s say.
I got 28 cookies out of the dough. Most recipes I found online said you would get 30, but I think I made mine a little bigger. I maybe ate some of the dough before it got baked, but definitely not two cookie’s worth.
Bigger cookies. Yea that’s where the two cookies went.
Let cool.
Don’t they just look like a celebration on a plate? I would send some to Tukka Rask if I could after the Bruins just swept the Penguins (yup, Bruins advance to Stanley Cup), but since I don’t have his address, we’ll just have to overcelebrate the promotion and eat the whole batch ourselves.
You can frost them with the Funfetti frosting if you want, but they’re perfect just like this.
