Today, dear readers, I am going to blow your mind and help you maintain your budget. Let’s bake our holiday cookies with cake mix. Think about it: you do not need to buy flour, sugar, baking soda and all the other cookie-baking ingredients because it is already in the cake mix. We are going to save so much money and time this way.

Makes about two dozen cookies.

1 box of cake mix

2 eggs

½ cup of applesauce

1 cup of M&Ms

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

In a mixing bowl combine the cake mix, eggs and applesauce. I used yellow cake mix because I just really like yellow cake as it is, but you can use any flavor of cake you would like.

I also keep individually packaged applesauces on hand all the time because they make for a good snack on the go. They also happen to be about ½ a cup per package.

Add the M&Ms or chocolate chips or whatever you want to add. The dough will be wetter than average cookie dough. If you want, you could add a few tablespoons of flour to make it thicker.

I used a spoon to plop the dough onto my ungreased pan. Using a spoon keeps the cookies a uniform size.

Bake for about 10-12 minutes, and cool on the pan for a little bit before moving them to a cooling rack. Or, if you are like me and do not have a cooling rack, use the baking sheet that does not fit into your oven.

Note: since this is cake mix, the cookies are going to rise because cakes rise. The cookies will not look very flat like regular cookies, and they also will be very soft.