Pumpkin Spice Cookies

This was the recipe I chose for the Cookie Swap that Sarah and I hosted this weekend. It's based somewhat on a bread recipe from my Mom. I fudged some numbers to make them more cookie-ish from online recipes and threw in a few extra things myself. They were great. We got full fast so I didn't try, but I would anticipate them being excellent with vanilla ice cream or cream cheese frosting.

Ingredients:

1 cup	dark brown sugar
1 cup	white sugar
2 sticks	softened butter
3 cups	whole wheat all purpose flour
2 tsp	baking soda
1/2 tsp	salt
1 can	pumpkin puree
2	eggs
5 tsp	orange marmalade
1 tsp	vanilla extract
1 tsp	cinnamon
1/2 tsp	ginger
1/4 tsp	nutmeg
1/4 tsp	ground cloves
1/4 tsp	allspice
1 cup	mini dark chocolate chips (regular works too, I guess)
1 cup	dried cranberries

Procedure:
Mix all ingredients. Cook in a hot oven until done.





Really there's not much more to it than that. I guess there's an order in which you're supposed to combine things; I'll tell you what I did, which worked out, but I suspect the exact order isn't that important. However, if you're doing all your stirring by hand like I am, this will make your life easier.

Preheat your oven to 350.

Soften the butter and mix it into a paste with the sugars. If you put them all in the same bowl before realizing that the butter is hard, leave it on top of the oven to melt. If you put sugar in the microwave for too long, bad things will happen to it.

Mix the flour, salt, and baking soda.

Mix the pumpkin, eggs, vanilla, marmalade, and spices.

Combine the butter mixture with the pumpkin mixture. Mix well to make sure you don't end up with lumps of spice. Gradually add the flour mixture. It will be a pretty wet batter but not soupy enough to settle after you mix it -- it will hold peaks. Mix in the chips and cranberries.

Put heaping tablespoons onto a buttered pan and bake until they bounce back when poked, about 20 minutes.

This recipe is huge. My cookies got incrementally larger as I went on making them since I realized I didn't want to do three rounds in the oven. They ended up about biscuit sized by the end. If you prefer smaller cookies, go for it, but don't cook them for as long.

They are very bready, no surprise, but really tasty. They are soft and moist without being overwhelmingly sweet. I think I liked them more than most. They weren't as popular as the chocolate overload cookies. That was predictable, though. A lot of people are bonkers for chocolate. I prefer these.