The Best Chocolate Chip Funfetti Cookies Easily Made Without Cake Mix

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Remember when everything was cake batter flavored, and we were all like, “Okay, it’s time to stop?” Do you also kind of miss that? Feeling sentimental for 2015 and its funfetti cookie craze, I’m sharing this recipe for the best chocolate chip funfetti cookies that you can make without a cake mix.

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For starters, I am a huge fan of cake mix cookies. They are so easy and you can do pretty much anything with them. My favorites are white cake cookies. Sooo delicate. I’ll share them sometime. But, I don’t always have a box on hand.

Making Cookies Taste Like Birthday Cake

What I do have (and you’re probably like me) are the ingredients to make a cake and the ingredients to make cookies. The key is playing up the things we love about cake. To me, that is the buttery-almondy-vanilla flavor and sprinkles, and that’s super easy to carry over to a cookie… even without cake mix!

All it means is starting with room temperature butter (and not browning it this time) and using almond and vanilla extracts for flavor. You could also use a bit of butter extract, but I find that it tastes chemically more than purely buttery.

The other thing that makes this different than my chocolate chip cookie recipe, is that instead of using any brown sugar, we’re using white sugar. Even light brown sugar has a molasses flavor that doesn’t feel like birthday cake. Sorry, my friend. Not this time.

Making Funfetti Cookies Without Substitutions

I’m listing out the substitutions for making these cookies healthier below specifically for a couple of my friends who recently made the switch to plant-based. I love them for that! What a great way to take care of yourself and the planet. I’m not that cool yet.

So, for those of us who are still cool with traditional baking, let’s dig into how you make these chewy, chocolatey, cake-battery nuggets of pure joy.

There are a couple important rules to cookie baking that still stand:

1. If it’s kept in the fridge, it needs to come to room temperature. That means the butter, the eggs, and the milk. No exceptions. Cold ingredients dropped into happy room temperature ingredients cause curdling.
2. Sift your dry ingredients. When the baking soda and salt are distributed evenly through the flour, you can mix quickly without concern about where these key ingredients end up. You never want to overmix the dough.
3. Chill the dough for at least an hour, if not overnight. Something magic happens when you let the dough rest in the fridge. All the ingredients and flavors get to know each other which is important for a cookie that’s tender, chewy, and doesn’t spread.

More Notes on the Cookie Dough

When you cream together the butter and sugar, you want to keep going until it looks a bit like frosting. If you’re using stevia, you’ll mix it in as well. If you’re using only substitute sweetener, cream the butter or butter substitute along first to make it fluffy. Then beat in the sweetener for about 2 minutes.

You want to add the egg, vanilla, and almond extract at once. Then, beat the mixture until the egg is fully incorporated. This will help distribute your flavors as well. And, I’m always a fan of adjusting the flavors to your liking, but be mindful that almond extract is very strong and too much will overpower everything.

Once that is done, you’ll dump all the dry ingredients in and mix just until there are no dry spots. There may still be dry stuff on the sides of the bowl, and there’s likely some at the bottom. Remove the bowl from the stand mixer anyway and grab a spatula.

Gently fold in the chocolate chips and sprinkles. Sprinkles tend to bleed their color, so you want to mix them as little as possible. With chocolate chips, I don’t mind running them through the mixer because it breaks them up and creates different sized chunks – just not for this recipe.

Reducing the Sugar in Cake Batter Cookies

The one thing about funfetti cookies is that they are notoriously sweet. We’re looking at a sugar cookie base, basically, with chocolate chips and sprinkles. Yowza. That’s a lot of sugar. So, I swapped in stevia for half of the sugar.

With stevia, I don’t ever want to replace all the sugar because it does something very funny when it bakes. For whatever reason, it creates holes in the structure (brownie, cake, or cookie), and it froths through the holes. In the end, you have a holey unattractive bake, and that’s no good.

If you want to, you can use a monk fruit sweetener to do a full sugar replacement. Check your package to make sure you use the right ratio, though.

The other thing you can do to keep your sugar in check is to use no-sugar-added chocolate chips. You may have already heard of Lily’s, especially if you’re following health bloggers. These are the best. They’re sweetened with stevia, and only have 6 ingredients, the first of which is cocoa, and they’re vegan.

You could even go one further and use these all-natural, no-sugar-added sprinkles. Seriously, these sprinkles from Good Dee’s are vegan with no sugar or artificial colors. I’ve got this in my shopping cart, but for now, I’m just using the sprinkles I already have on hand.

Can You Make a Vegan Version of Funfetti Cookies?

Using the alternative chocolate chips and sprinkles is a start. The other things to be mindful of when turning these cookies vegan is that you need swaps for the eggs and butter.

The butter part is wicked easy. Get butter flavored Crisco. It’s vegan, shelf-stable, and it comes with instructions to substitute it for butter. For the first 25 years of my life, that’s what I was using for my chocolate chip cookies before I discovered browned butter. It genuinely makes awesome, buttery cookies.

The egg part is, surprisingly, also very easy. If you’re rocking veganism, you have ground flaxseeds on hand, right? Okay, so in a small container, mix together 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseeds with 2 tablespoons of lukewarm water. Let it sit for 5 minutes, and you have a flax egg ready to go.

Also, you should check out my vegan oatmeal raisin cookie recipe. It’s one of my favorite cookie recipes.

Resting and Baking the Cookie Dough

However you make your funfetti cookie dough, it still needs to rest in the fridge. As I mentioned above, this helps everyone get to know each other. After about an hour, you can start preheating the oven and scooping the dough onto your baking sheet.

Leave about 2 inches of room for them to spread a bit, but they really shouldn’t spread that much. Once you’ve baked them at 350ºF for 10-12 minutes, you’ll want to let them cool for 5 minutes on the pan to firm up a bit. Then transfer them to a cooling rack to cool the rest of the way.

They’ll keep in a sealed container for 5 days, or you can freeze them for up to 6 months.

So, that’s it for the best chocolate chip funfetti cookies you can make without using a boxed cake mix. It’s really easy, and you’re going to love them!

Comment below and let me know how yours turned out, especially if you tried some of the healthy substitutions. And don’t forget to subscribe for weekly blog updates and an awesome freebie!

Chocolate Chip Funfetti Cookies

Nothing starts a party like a plate full of chocolate chip funfetti cookies, but what if you don't have a box of cake mix? You don't need it!

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 10 minutes mins

Cook Time 12 minutes mins

Resting Time 1 hour hr

Course Dessert

Cuisine American

Servings 3 dozen

Equipment

• Stand mixer with paddle attachment
• Sheet pan and cooling rack
• Parchment paper or silicone baking mat

Ingredients

  

• ½ cup unsalted butter room temperature
• 1 cup pure cane sugar
• 1 large egg room temperature
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• ½ tsp almond extract
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• ½ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp pink himalayan sea salt
• 1 cup chocolate chips
• ½ cup sprinkles

Instructions

 

• In the bowl of the stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar.
• Add in the egg, vanilla, and almond extract and beat to fully combine.
• Sift in the flour, baking soda, and salt. Mix until just incorporated.
• Fold in the chocolate chips and sprinkles.
• Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or overnight.
• Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Scoop out 1 tablespoon-sized balls of dough, and place on a lined baking sheet 2 inches apart.
• Bake for 10-12 minutes. Cool on the pan for 5, and then transfer the cookies to a cooling rack to finish cooling completely.

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