Cake Batter Cookie Stackers

We recently had friends visit us for a couple of days and they brought along their 2-yr old daughter.  She is truly the sweetest little girl!  Such great manners!  She and Brutus, our Chinese Shar-Pei, became fast friends.  Since I knew she was coming I wanted to make a cute dessert that would be fun for her but would also appease the adult eaters.  Now my husband will eat ANYTHING that you call dessert, but I wanted to make something new that was fun and tasty.


Did I mention that they were coming during my first week back to school, which included 20 chapters of reading and many tedious assignments?  So I needed something that was also going to be quick.  I ran across a recipe at BettyCrocker.com for Cake Batter Cookie Stackers and it was love at first sight!  They were cake batter cookies made from a store bought sugar-cookie mix and a yellow cake mix adorned with bright, rainbow-colored frosting and sprinkles.  The inner kid in me jumped up-and-down with giddy excitement!  


I never make cookies from mixes because I am always in a hurry but since this recipe was Betty Crocker and added yellow cake mix, which is one of my favorite things, I thought it was worth a shot.  Let me tell you, this recipe was better than advertised!  I made the cookies smaller then the recipe called for because I didn't want each cookie stacker to be a full meal!


I changed the frosting slightly.  My family enjoys cream cheese frosting so I made a variation that included 4 oz. of cream cheese, 1 TBS of butter, 2 tsp vanilla extract, 1 TBS milk, and enough powdered sugar to make the frosting stiff but spreadable (about 2 cups).  Then I divided the frosting into four containers and colored each batch.  I used icing color gels, you could use Wilton gels but I used Americolor gel paste because my local store had the Americolor in the electric colors.  

 After separating the icing into four small dishes, I tinted one Electric Blue, one Regal Purple, one Electric Pink, and one Electric Yellow.  I know you can make any color from red, blue, and yellow but purple is a very difficult color to make using red and blue!  Anyway, I began frosting cookies and stacking them.  Then I took some of the yellow and mixed it with the remaining blue to get electric green (or a close enough color) and added the rest of the yellow to the pink to get electric orange.  Miraculously, I ended up with the exact amount of icing that I needed to frost each cookie!

Here is the final stack of cookie stackers! Aren't the rainbow colors so great?!

I used multi-colored sanding sugar instead of the color sprinkles because I had the sugar on hand.

  The details of the cookies was just to great to pass up!

They looked so cute and tasted great!  Most importantly they were super simple to make.  Oh, and everyone loved them!  I think the adults were way more impressed than the sweet girl I was trying to impress!  


Here are two more pictures from that visit.  I couldn't resist posting these since we were able to go to the zoo in January without freezing!  In Ohio, that is unreal!  

My hubby with sweet Aubrey 

Our mandatory self-portrait.  We went to the zoo on our second date and have taken one of these pictures every time since!