Tonight I let Juliet make the final decision about which cookies to make, since she didn’t like Nathaniel’s gargantuan chocolate birthday cake, or the pumpkin cheesecake on Thanksgiving. I showed her five different cookie photos and she chose these. Good call, Juliet!
I started with butter and sugar, substituting a less refined cane sugar for granulated.
It took on the right texture, although the color was slightly different due to the sugar, and I added the pumpkin, molasses, vanilla, and egg.
Once mixed, the texture did look a little weird, definitely more speckly than I expected.
But I kept going.
Separately, I mixed the dry ingredients: flour (swapping in whole wheat white), baking soda, salt, cinnamon (heaping teaspoonfuls instead of level), ground ginger, cloves (a pinch less than suggested), plus a few shakes of pumpkin pie spice for good luck.
I whisked it together, then started adding it incrementally to the batter, mixing on low speed to avoid flour poofs. It came together nicely.
I gave it a little more mixing with the spatula, then covered it and put it in the fridge for just over an hour.
I put Juliet to bed with a story, and then came downstairs to make the cookies. Nathaniel was eager to help out, even agreeing to postpone our viewing of the latest episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon for one day. What a kid.
We used a cookie scoop to keep the sizes reasonably uniform, then rolled the dough into balls and rolled it in Turbinado sugar, substituting for granulated again.
I love using Turbinado sugar, it makes everything sparkly.
By the very end of the batch, the dough was getting sticky again, so I’d suggest putting it back in the fridge in between batches to keep that from happening. At the very end, it was too sticky to work with, so I did leave a tiny bit of batter that could have been turned into something.
I found the right baking time was about 12 minutes, and I got over 50 cookies instead of the predicted three dozen. They looked great.
Nathaniel was the first taste tester.
They’re delicious! Great choice, Juliet! Crunchy on the outside with a lovely sweetness because of the sugar, chewy on the inside without that weird cakeyness that pumpkin cookies have, not too sweet and not too spicy, just lovely little bites bursting with flavor. I will definitely be making these at Christmas, plus you can keep the dough in the fridge for a few days and then bake when you’re ready.
They’re delicious they’re easy and fun to make, they smell great, and for those on Weight Watchers, they’re 2 P+ each. The problem is that you want to eat all 50 of them, but that’s always the problem, and a good one to have.
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