Baking with Betty Crocker - Spooky Spider Cookies

We were lucky enough to be chosen to take part in a new Insiders UK and Betty Crocker campaign.

We got our pack through last week and it contained lots of different goodies:

- Chocolate chip cookies mix
- velvety vanilla cake mix
- chocolate fudge brownies mix
- gooey salted caramel brownies mix
- vanilla icing
- recipe cards, campaign booklet and money off coupons :)

I decided to give the cookie mix a whirl with H

It's probably the easiest of the mixes - you pour the mix into a bowl add 2-3 teaspoons of water and mix - in around 2-3 minutes it mixes up into an easy dough.

H  (aged 4) was able to mix it together with very little assistance from me.

Once the dough was formed we split it into 8 roughly the same size balls which we put onto a baking tray and flattened with a spoon to make the cookies. H needed a bit more help with this as the dough was a tad tacky. We made sure to leave lots of space on the tray.

The cookies baked in around 15 minutes at gas mark 4 (the instructions said 10-12 minutes on gas mark 5 but I know my oven tends to the higher temp). Despite giving them plenty of room on the tray the cookies did slightly merge together when they cooked - but this was easy resolved by cutting them slightly with a knife when we got them out of the oven.

As it's Halloween I decided we would gt creative and decorate our cookies. I had some chocolate coins and some strawberry laces in the cupboard. I cut the laces up and H and I placed 4 laces folded in half on the cookie and added one of the chocolate coins on top - I then popped them back on the baking tray and popped them into the still hot oven for 5 mins.We got them out and H helped to smear the melted coins with a spoon over the laces to make a spider body, We added small pea sized bits of the vanilla icing to make eyes and used some cut off bits of laces to make smiley faces and finish the eyes. We left them cool for an hour on a wire rack.

Whilst they cooled the cookies firmed up and became more crunchy and then it was time to try them:)

They were really crunchy and tasty and not too chocolatey.

The mix made up 8 cookies around 7 cm in size and the whole process from mixing, to baking to decorating took around 30 minutes.

Overall we really enjoyed trying out this mix and and look forward to trying out some of the other mixes in the pack