Why Your Cool Whip Cookies Keep Falling Flat (And What To Do About It)

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Cool Whip cookies are a tasty treat that can be made with just a few simple ingredients. These soft and airy cookies are a lighter variation of the traditional holiday treat chocolate crinkle cookies, which are essentially a mix of a brownie and a chocolate chip cookie dusted with powdered sugar. Cool Whip cookies, like traditional crinkles, have a cracked appearance due to the dough being rolled in powdered sugar (which you can easily make at home), and should ideally have a puffed-up appearance and fluffy texture once baked. If you find that your Cool Whip cookies are turning out flat, you might be skipping an important step for adding height to your cookies: chilling the dough. 

The dough for Cool Whip cookies is typically made with cake mix, Cool Whip, and an egg to bind the ingredients. The whipped topping makes the dough fairly sticky, which is one reason why it's recommended to chill it in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes to make it easier to work with. More importantly, chilling cookie dough helps prevent flat cookies by hardening the fat (butter or oil) in the dough. When the fat is solidified, it melts more slowly in the oven and the dough doesn't spread as quickly, resulting in taller, puffier cookies. While Cool Whip cookies are not made with butter, the Cool Whip acts as the fat since it contains vegetable oil and cream. Follow a few more simple tips for whipping up the tastiest batch of these light and sweet cake-like cookies. 

Cool Whip cookies can be made with any type of cake mix, popular options being strawberry, lemon, chocolate, red velvet, and confetti cake. The bright colors as a result of using different cake mixes are part of what make them so whimsical, as well as the powdered sugar and crinkled/cracked surface. Of course, the sugary taste and melt-in-your-mouth texture make these cookies truly irresistible. 

For the best looking and tasting Cool Whip cookies, aside from refrigerating the dough, make sure to coat the dough balls with a generous amount of powdered sugar. This will also help prevent the cookies from flattening, as well as give them the desired cracked appearance. If the dough is still sticking to your hands after being refrigerated, add a tiny bit of oil or cooking spray to your hands to make it easier to form the dough balls. 

It also helps to use a cookie scoop, like Gorilla Grip's Stainless Steel Cookie Scoop, to scoop the balls of dough into the bowl of powdered sugar. Once covered in powdered sugar, they won't be so sticky and you can easily place them on your cookie sheet. Don't forget to spray the sheet pan with cooking spray or use parchment paper, like Reynolds Kitchens Cookie Baking Sheets, to prevent the cookies from sticking to the pan. Cool Whip cookies can be stored at room temperature in an airtight container for around three to four days or frozen for around three months.