Ok, we suck.

Holidays and vacation have left us no time to blog this month.

But don't forsake us, we have many blogs in the works.

Until then let me just say this. I know I told you that nothing with bacon could ever be bad...

But nobody messes with Diet Coke.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

A few weeks ago one of our friends was talking to Shea proclaiming that Pumpkin Chocolate Chip cookies would be amazing- if they existed. Of that fact she was not sure, but she asked Shea if she thought I would be able to make them.

When Shea relayed the story to me it was as if a gauntlet had been thrown down! Now I had to make them. I had no choice.

My first thought was that someone, somewhere must have done this before.

A quick Google search pulled up more than a few recipes.

Almost all the recipes had one thing in common; they called for 1 cup pumpkin. This seemed odd to me because most cans of pumpkin are 15oz (1 and 1/2 cups). Why didn't any of the recipes call for the whole can?

I'm guessing that it's because there is too much moisture in pureed pumpkin. What most recipes seemed to do was take a normal Chocolate chip cookie recipe add a cup of pumpkin and bump up the flour content to account for the extra moisture.

The problem with this is that cookies don't do well with a lot of moisture, even with some extra flour. The way all the recipes that I found were written, you'd end up with more of a cake in the shape of a cookie rather than an actual cookie.

This is probably the reason for the popularity of the the pumpkin Chocolate chip muffin.

But I was determined. A cake disguised as a cookie simply wouldn't do.

So I took things into my own hands. Using the recipe I had found online as a base, I started working on my own recipe.

In order to make them more like cookies I needed to remove as much of the moisture as I could. I pulled an old trick that I learned from Cooks Illustrated a few years ago when making Pumpkin cheese cake.

I dumped a 15oz can of pumpkin onto 4 layers of paper towel and topped it with another 6 layers. This essentially pulls out most of the moisture from the puree leaving the flavorful pumpkin behind.

But I still needed to get more moisture out of the recipe. So I also removed one egg white, which, is mostly water.

I began building my cookies. Here is the recipe.

The Wet:

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
• 1 cup white sugar
  
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 1 large egg + 1 large egg yolk
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 15 oz can pumpkin puree dried between layers of paper towel, the dryer the better)
  
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

The Dry

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

The Extras

• 2 cups (12-ounce bag) chocolate chips, semisweet or milk chocolate whatever you enjoy.
  

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spray 2 cookie sheets with oil, or line them with parchment paper.

Melt butter and allow to cool slightly. Mix all other "wet" ingredients together adding butter last. Mix until combined.

Mix all "dry" ingredients together to ensure even distribution of ingredients.

Pour the "wet" into the "dry" and mix for a short moment, you should still see lots of pockets of flour.

Add the "Extras" and mix just until flour is no longer obvious. Its better to under mix a bit rather than to over mix.

Spoon cookies of desired size and bake until done depending on how big your cookies are. I like them big, i usually weigh my cookies to about 55 grams and bake them for about 14-15 min.

Follow this recipe and you'll get fairly forward pumpkin flavor, slight spice and a cookie like structure.

Good eats for sure.

-richard-