On 12/12/12 we had my annual holiday office party.  This year it included a game of “Dirty Santa” (White Elephant) and a Christmas cookie exchange.  My lovely mother-in-law sent me a recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip cookies earlier this fall, but with the arrival of Monkey, I hadn’t gotten around to trying them.  Frog was excited to test out the recipe, as he loves all things pumpkin, so he hovered around the kitchen the entire time I was preparing the cookies.

Besides our beloved breakfast standby, pumpkin bread, I haven’t baked many cookies, cakes or  breads with canned pumpkin.  The cookie dough was much closer in composition to a cake batter than the traditional cookie dough.  (The batter tasted delicious though!)  I talked to a coworker who told me that all of her pumpkin cookie recipes end up being more cake-y than cookie-y, maybe that’s what happens when you add canned pumpkin.  Here’s what the dough/batter looked like:

The cookies didn’t expand outward as much as I expected, so I realized after one batch that I could put more on a cookie sheet than I thought.  They actually took only 12 minutes to cook perfectly in my crotchety electric oven.  (BTW, if you don’t have SILPAT sheets for baking, you don’t know what you are missing.  They are fabulous!)

The final product was a rich, chewy, cake-like cookie.  Frog said that they didn’t taste much like pumpkin, and I would agree with him.  I was expecting more pronounced pumpkin flavor.  However, Frog still enjoyed a few and complained when I took the majority of them to work.  The cinnamon in the recipe was noticeable, and I’m curious what they would taste like with pumpkin pie spice.

Here is the recipe we used:

• 1 cup canned pumpkin
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 c. vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 2 cups flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. milk
• 1 Tbsp. vanilla
• 2 c. (1 bag) chocolate chips
• 1/2 c. walnuts (optional )  *We didn’t use walnuts, as I’m not partial to them!*