Seasonal recipe: Pumpkin spice cookies

These vegan pumpkin spice cookies make a great lunch box treat.

Thu, Sep 10 2009 at 10:00 AM

Related Topics:

Healthy Eating, Organic Cooking, Recipes, Vegetarianism & Veganism

Pumpkin Spice Cookies

I had it in my mind that I wanted this week’s seasonal recipe to something fallish and something to stick in a lunch box in honor of back to school. Yesterday, when I went to check my RSS feed the perfect recipe jumped right out at me. My friend Derek Markham, aka the Natural Papa, had posted a recipe for Ridiculously Good Pumpkin Spice Cookies on his blog.

So for the second week in a row, I went completely out of my family’s food comfort zone. Last week, I made roasted eggplant soup (which, by the way was even better reheated two days later than it was when first made), and the words eggplant and soup together had never been used in my home before.

This week, I made cookies with all whole wheat flour. Derek’s recipe calls for them to be vegan also, but I went ahead and used eggs (or as he would call them liquid chickens) instead of egg substitute.

The house smelled amazing as these were baking last night, and my ten-year-old popped his head in the kitchen and begged for just one before he went to bed. His reaction, “Hmmm. Not bad. Actually, they’re good.” His initial reaction when he heard I was making pumpkin cookies using wheat flour was one of skepticism.

Here is Derek’s original recipe, and below the recipe you’ll find my notes on some of the changes I made.

Preheat oven to 325°F

Ingredients (all organic, yes?):

1 cup cooked pumpkin (cut in half, scoop out seeds, place cut side down on baking sheet and bake at 350 until soft. Peel and mash or blend the pumpkin.)
1/2 cup coconut oil (or butter, or even olive oil)
3/4 cup unrefined sugar (or maple syrup or honey)
Egg replacer equivalent for 2 eggs
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Time Estimates

Prep time: 10 min, plus one hour to chill

Cook time: 10 min

Total time: 20 min

Directions

Mix all of the ingredients together, adjust spices to your taste, and chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour. Drop by the spoonful onto greased cookie sheets and bake for 8 to 10 minutes.
Try substituting sweet potatoes or butternut squash (or any winter squash) for the pumpkin for a different taste, put them in muffin tins, or bake in a loaf pan.
They’re incredibly tasty (ridiculously good, even), and you can eat all you want, because they’re made from vegetables!

Yield

Makes 2 dozen cookies

[Actually, you can't eat all you want, because of course you'll need to share some with the wife and kids, right? And anything you read on this blog is purely conjecture, so don't tell your doctor I said you could eat all you want.]

My notes:

I used whole eggs instead of egg substitute.
I used canned pumpkin because my store didn’t have any pumpkins yet, and I didn’t have time to run to a farm market yesterday.
After making the batter, I tasted and thought the cookies would need more salt for my family’s taste. I made one sheet of the cookies with Derek’s recommended amount of salt, then added another ¼ tsp of salt to the remaining batter. I like the flavor of the cookies with the extra salt better.
I made some of the cookies without the walnuts, some with the walnuts and some with raisins. My favorite cookies turned out to be the ones with the raisins. The walnut ones were good, too. My son liked the plain ones, but I think they need a little something in them. Chocolate chips might be good, too.
They needed longer to cook than 10 minutes – more like 12 minutes in my oven.

I want to thank Derek for sharing his recipe and helping me find a new treat I can put in my boys’ lunch box.

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