pumpkin cookies

Eight days! It's been eight whole days since I wrote my last post. In the blog world... that's an eternity.

The truth is blogging takes up a crazy amount of time. And sometimes I need my time for other things. What kind of things? Well I can't say. Yet!

I've been working on a couple special projects that require a lot of time. While my deadline approaches I pretty much have to ignore everything to insure that they get done. And sadly everything includes blog time.

But it hasn't been all work! I got to play a little too. In case you didn't know, last Saturday was a special day. The first day of Autumn!!! Obviously!!

To celebrate I had to make something with pumpkin. I went with cookies.

When it comes to baking, pumpkins are truly magical. Anything you add pumpkin too will be soft and pillowy. At least in my experiences anyway.

The recipe, as usual, is a hybrid. I looked at a few recipes and picked and chose what I liked until I came up with my own. So here it is!

Pumpkin cookies:

3 3/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Mix butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Then add pumpkin puree, egg and vanilla. Stir until mixed.

This is where I do things differently than most cookie recipes suggest. I don't mix the dry ingredients separately! Eeeep. But the world still turns. What I do is stir in a cup of flour at a time to the wet ingredients until it's all incorporated. With my last cup of flour I add the other dry ingredients; in this recipe it's salt, baking soda and pumpkin pie spice. This way you don't have to dirty another bowl. How efficient!

Once the cookie dough is all mixed up scoop tablespoon-sized balls into a sugar cinnamon mix. Fully coat the balls of cookie dough then transfer them to a parchment paper lined cookie sheet.

To make them look like little pumpkins I used the edge of a glass to create curved vertical lines. This also helps to flatten the cookies out a bit. And it makes them very cute!

Bake for about 10 minutes until puffy and slightly browned around the edges.

I didn't get a chance to photograph the process of mixing them up because I wanted to do it quickly. But these are just too good to keep to myself!!!  

More posts next week! I promise!!