Tis the season to buy cans of pumpkin puree! I love pumpkin pie, but you don't have to limit your pumpkiny goodness to pie. My pulse races when I think of all the delicious ways we can use pumpkin! Pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin bread, pumpkin soup, pumpkin beer, pumpkin everything! I wanted to take advantage of a killer recipe for pumpkin cinnamon rolls because they sound oh so wonderful, but instead I made cookies using a Food Network recipe because you can eat cookies alllll day long, while cinnamon rolls are kind of a "breakfast only" type of food.
I went to visit my parents for the weekend and oh golly, they have so many luxuries in comparison to my sad apartment! Using my mom's KitchenAid was crazy awesome. We don't have any sort of mixer at all, so usually I have to work my arm like crazy any time I cream the butter to make cookies. This is probably for the best, so that I don't make too many cookies and so that I get some exercise, but it was nice to have a little break from it. Also, my mom has multiple cookie sheets. What!? She is so spoiled. And an oven that beeps when it has preheated, so that I don't have to guess when the oven is 350. Oh, modern technology, you are so beautiful and amazing!
After a delicious dinner of pho, I was looking for a sweet treat (per usual). Dad enthusiastically suggested cookies, then immediately disappeared as soon as his enthusiasm caught on. Cookies are really a one person job anyway (except for scooping the dough), so I didn't really mind his absence, but I thought it was funny. Besides, my mom was around to lend a hand in the final stages.
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| ready for the oven! |
I beat the butter until it was smooth, then add 1 cup of white sugar and 1 cup of brown sugar (a bit at a time) and kept on beating until it looked nice and fluffy. Beat beat beat. Then, in went one egg, then another. Beat beat beat. Next, I dropped in a teaspoon of delicious vanilla extract. Beat beat beat. Finally, the exciting part: I added a can of pumpkin puree (check your can to make sure it is simply pumpkin puree and not already spiced to be pumpkin pie filling!). NOMS! So moist and aromatic. Then, I added the dry ingredients a bit at a time. This is when I started to realize, "This is a lot of dough...we're going to have a lot of cookies!" So, if you don't want 4 dozen cookies, consider making half a batch, although I don't know what you'd do with the other half can of pumpkin puree. Maybe you could make some of those cinnamon rolls that look so divine? Anyway, the last ingredient to add is about two cups of milk chocolate chips.
Finally, my mom and I put some parchment paper down on the cookie sheets and scooped the dough into heaps. We fit a dozen on each sheet, which made it very easy to keep track of how many cookies we made. Fortunately/unfortunately, this did NOT help us keep track of how many I ate while the other cookies baked...I honestly don't think I want to know! But pumpkin is good for you, right? And milk is good for you, which is in the milk chocolate chips. Bam. Eat ten of them and you have an all around healthy meal!
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| heap of cookies! this is not even half of them! |
So, get excited while you make your cookies, but don't let my tangential thinking distract you from keeping track of your cookies. You want them to bake for about 15 to 20 minutes. When you take them out, let them cool for a couple minutes before you eat them. Our cookies didn't end up crunchy (which is absolutely fine with me), but this might be because we cooked them for 15 minutes rather than longer or it might be because the pumpkin made it so moist. It kind of reminded me of eating pumpkin bread. Nom nom nom! C is for cookie and it's good enough for me!