Unable to retrieve cookies set by Laravel

According to the official docs on cookies:

By default, all cookies generated by Laravel are encrypted and signed so that they can't be modified or read by the client. If you would like to disable encryption for a subset of cookies generated by your application, you may use the $except property of the App\Http\Middleware\EncryptCookies middleware, which is located in the app/Http/Middleware directory

In my controller that sends a response with cookies, I set a cookie with return response("Success", 200)->cookie('api_token', $api_token, 2, '/');, where $api_token is a string generated by Str::random(80). I have a route in web.php that is protected by middleware that checks if the cookie is valid. However, using $request->cookie('api_token'); in the middleware returns nothing, but I have to make an exception in the EncryptCookies for api_token to make this work.

I'm not sure why my cookie isn't being encrypted, even if I use a laravel function to set it. Am I misunderstanding which cookies are "generated" by Laravel?

via Chebli Mohamed