I don’t like soft cookies very much. They remind me too much of those big, cake cookies from the grocery store with a cylindrical dollop of frosting on top. The problem isn’t the frosting: I love frosting, even if it’s shelf stable from a canister. I just find that cake cookies somehow manage to be dissatisfying as both cookie and cake.
Consequently, I tend to dislike cookies with bananas, apple sauce, pumpkin, or other fruit or vegetable purees. They inevitably come out soft, and I would prefer more crisp.
And yet, I still want to do some seasonal baking. Julie suggested this recipe for pumpkin cookies, and after a false start when the local Safeway was sold out of pumpkin puree, I dove in the following week.
The only other unusual ingredient was molasses, but we keep molasses on-hand for bread machine recipes. We were at the end of a bottle, so it’s upside down in a yogurt container to drain out.
After creaming the sugar and butter, the pumpkin and molasses go in with the eggs. It completely curdled in a strangely colored mess. Picky Palate’s pictures didn’t show anything like that, and it didn’t go away by beating longer. However, I haven’t actually run into problems with cookie recipes because of this, so I continued on.
And everything looked fine after incorporating the dry ingredients. The dough was still a little wet, so I knew soft cookies were coming.
I baked 1/4 cup scoops first as instructed, which is somewhere between 2 to 3 times the size of a normal cookie. Having not witnessed a notable difference in most cookies between silicone and parchments, I have gone back to using silicone more often.
They baked just fine in the time provided. They were slightly oblong due to how I transferred the balls to the sheet, but that did provide a clear axis for breaking the cookies in half.
I also baked regular sized cookies for comparison. The bake time was slightly shorter but still within the recipe provided window.
We actually didn’t notice much of a difference in flavor between the sizes (at least immediately), so I finished out the batch as small cookies. Perhaps there would have been a more noticeable difference on subsequent days.
Overall the cookies were fine. I actually didn’t think they really tasted a lot like pumpkin, but I think I mostly associate pumpkin with the pumpkin spices. Also, the cookies were soft, which I won’t hold against them because I knew that going in.
If you’re a soft cookie sort of person, you can find the recipe on Picky Palate.
I also had overripe bananas from the office, so I also made these banana chocolate chip bars. They were fine, but I think I’ll stick with banana bread in the future.
