These soft and chewy cheesecake cookies are made by dressing up a vanilla cake mix with cream cheese and eggs. The chocolate chips are optional, but highly recommended!
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I don't know about you, but I'll choose cookies over cake if I'm given a choice. Unless that cake is, in fact, cheesecake. To be fair, though, a cheesecake isn't really a cake in the traditional sense, is it? It doesn't matter at all, though, since cheesecake cookies are the best of everything. The end.
Cheesecake Cookies have all the gorgeous decadence of cheesecake. They're pillow-soft, smooth and rich, but they still have all the fun of a cookie. And they are, seriously, ready to eat in 20 minutes flat. How's that for easy?
I've been making these ridiculously easy cookies since at least 2010, when I developed the recipe for my second cookbook, Gluten Free on a Shoestring Quick and Easy. In that cookbook, there's an entire chapter (Chapter 8) on make-your-own dessert mixes. One of those mixes is for a make-your-own vanilla cake mix, which I've since shared here on the blog.
Gluten free cake mixes
Cake mixes are the sort of thing that I never really understood until I wrote that cookbook. I mean, what's so hard about throwing together a few basic dry cake ingredients like flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar? And then I finally realized that cake mixes offered certainty. Everything was measured precisely. So when you add the eggs, maybe some oil and some water, you'll get the same cake every single time.
If you'd like to make this recipe with a boxed vanilla cake mix (gluten free or not!), it will work. And I will not judge you! But if you'd like to make your own cake mix, you can do that too. You just need a simple digital food scale, and my cake mix recipe.
Cheesecake cookies ingredients and substitution suggestions
As always, unless I specifically indicate otherwise, I haven't tried this recipe with any of these substitutions. They're simply my best-educated guesses, designed to help those of you who have other dietary restrictions still enjoy some amazing recipes.
Dairy-Free: I'm not gonna lie—there's a whole lot of dairy in these cheesecake cookies. Replacing the butter is easy enough (I think Spectrum nonhydrogenated butter-flavored vegetable shortening would work great), but then there's the matter of the cream cheese.
There are plenty of nondairy cream cheeses on the market, but none taste just like the “real thing” to me. My make-your-own vanilla cake mix also contains dairy in the form of buttermilk powder, but in that recipe, you can replace the buttermilk powder with an equal amount, by weight, of coconut milk powder or blanched finely ground almond flour.
Egg-Free: My standard substitute recommendation for eggs is a “chia egg” (mix 1 tablespoon ground chia seeds with 1 tablespoon lukewarm water and allow it to gel) for each actual egg. Since this recipe is so super simple, I'm honestly not sure how it would work here, though.
Easy Cheesecake Cookies
Equipment
- Handheld mixer
Ingredients
- 8 ounces mascarpone cheese or cream cheese at room temperature
- 4 tablespoons (56 g) unsalted butter at room temperature
- 2 (100 g (weighed out of shell)) eggs at room temperature, beaten
- ½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 1 (16 ounces) box gluten-free yellow cake mix or 1 recipe Make-Your-Own Vanilla Cake Mix
- 3 to 4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips (optional)
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 350°F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with unbleached parchment paper and set it aside.
- In a large bowl, place the mascarpone or cream cheese, butter, eggs, and vanilla, and beat well with a mixer or by hand.
- Add the vanilla cake mix and mix by hand until just combined. The dough will be thick.
- Add the optional chocolate chips and mix until the chips are evenly distributed throughout the dough.
- Divide the dough into portions of about 1 1/2 tablespoons each (or about 2 teaspoonsful for smaller cookies) onto the prepared baking sheet, about 1 inch apart.
- Flatten the mounds of dough into disks with wet hands.
- Place the baking sheet in the center of the preheated oven and bake until the cookies are just beginning to brown on the underside and the edges.
- For larger cookies, baking takes about 14 minutes; for smaller cookies, about 10 minutes.
- Allow the cookies to cool until set on the baking sheet before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
- These cookies freeze amazingly well, so they can easily be made ahead of time.
- Just freeze them in a single layer on a baking sheet before piling them into a freezer-safe container. They don’t even freeze solid, so they barely have to thaw before you can eat them.
Notes
Nutrition
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Hi, I’m Nicole. I create gluten free recipes that really work and taste as good as you remember. No more making separate meals when someone is GF, or buying packaged foods that aren’t good enough to justify the price. At Gluten Free on a Shoestring, “good, for gluten free” just isn’t good enough! Come visit my bio!
Rosemary says
I have ground almonds but Is this the same as almond flour and could I use it in your cake mix? Hope so as I really must make these, they look lovely.
Natividad I says
Can dried fruit be used in place of chocolate chips? Or freeze dried fruit?
Nicole Hunn says
Sure, Natividad. I’d do dried fruit, not freeze-dried fruit depending upon being dry, and baking in the cookies will make the fruit chewy in an unpleasant way.