Easiest Peanut Butter Cookies (ever!)

 My family loves cookies.  But I must confess, I usually buy them at the grocery store. Why... I am totally afraid to bake them.  I have not baked cookies in over a decade because I stink at it.  My cookies (if you can call them that) turn into literal hockey pucks.  I've drooled over all the cookie recipes from all my food blogger friends who seem to whip these up with such grace and ease.  I drool and feel envy because I feel like my cookies would never turn out the same (even if I followed their delicious recipes).  Well, I baked my first batch of cookies yesterday and I felt like a cookie baker for the first time.  I was literally dancing around my kitchen.  So what made all the difference in my cookie baking?  Can you believe it was a box of cake mix?  YES!  Cake mix!  I found a book called Everything Cake Mix and holy cow is it good.  I'm the cake box queen as most of you can see so I had to try this recipe and share it with all of you.  So if you're a baker or a  non-baker like me, try this recipe.  I'm sure it will blow your socks off on how easy and "fool proof" it is.  Speaking as the biggest cookie fool in the world. : )

 Ingredients:
1 box of yellow cake mix
1 cup of creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup of vegetable oil
2 eggs
2 Tbs of water


Directions:

Mix the eggs, water, oil and peanut butter well.

Then add your cake mix and beat until it forms a cookie dough texture.

 I spayed a baking sheet with cooking spray and rolled out the peanut butter cookies into balls.  Now I must warn you when doing this step it felt like there was a lot of oil because my hands were oily when rolling them. I was panicking thinking I did something wrong.  But it bakes fine. I also made a mistake with my first batch by making the balls of cookie dough way too big (bigger than a golf ball).  You want them not so big (about walnut size) because they will spread out.

Peanut butter cookies have a special pattern on them.  You need to take a fork and press down in a cross pattern.   Then bake in a 350 degree oven for 12 minutes.  Take them out of the oven and allow them to sit on the warm cookie sheet for 2 more minutes then transfer them to a cooling rack.

These came out with the perfect soft, chewy consistency my cookies NEVER had before. I loved them. My kids loved them and the biggest cookie monster in our house, my hubby, loved them.  I just baked cookies and they crumbled!!  No hockey pucks here!  Yay!  Yippy! Hooray!  Okay now get ready for a million other ways to bake these cookies... time to experiment.