Oatmeal-Chocolate Morsel Cookies

This is a doctored cake-mix cookie recipe, the kind that lives on the back of recipe boxes for emergencies and after-school baking. A box of yellow cake mix with pudding does the heavy lifting on flour, leavening, and sugar, leaving you to dump in oats and mix-ins until the dough is thick with everything good.

The chocolate-pudding-style cake mix is what gives these cookies their distinctive softness. The pudding mix in the package keeps the dough moist and the finished cookies tender for days, where a plain cake mix would dry out by day two.

Three cups of mix-ins (oats, raisins, chocolate morsels, and pecans, one cup each) is a serious load. The cookies bake up rough and chunky rather than smooth, which is exactly the appeal. Every bite has at least three different textures.

A third cup of vegetable oil keeps things in cookie territory rather than cakey. Don’t substitute butter; the oil is what gives these cookies their distinctively soft, slightly chewy bite.

Pro Tips

• Toast the chopped pecans for 5 minutes in a dry pan before adding for a deeper, nuttier flavor.
• Drop dough in rounded spoonfuls, not flattened. The cookies don’t spread much on their own.
• Bake at 350°F (180°C) for about 10 to 12 minutes. Pull when edges are set but centers still look slightly underdone for soft cookies.
• Cool 2 minutes on the sheet before transferring. Hot cookies tear.

Variations

• Use a chocolate or spice cake mix instead of yellow for a different background flavor.
• Swap raisins for dried cranberries or chopped dried apricots for a fruitier version.
• Add ½ teaspoon cinnamon to the dough for warmer flavor that plays against the chocolate chips.