Is data returned from Mongoose immutable?

I want to add to the return data from a mongoose query:

User.findById(userId, function(err, data) {
  if (!err) {
    data.newvar = 'Hello, world';
  }
});

However, when I console log the output, the newvar does not exist. I've also tried this using Underscore's extend:

_.extend(data, {'newvar': 'Hello, world'});

With no luck either. Since I have nested documents, using a shallow copy won't work. Is there any way to append data here?