Tuesday, September 19, 2017

PUMPKIN OATMEAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

My DIL Sara has been excited about pumpkin anything. She sent me a picture/recipe from Pinterest and told me I should try them. The recipe or at least the idea sounded familiar so I checked it out. The I sent her a response telling her I had already and a link to my post Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins. (She made them as cookies though.)

Well, anyway, her interest ignited my interest. I know we still have a few days of summer left but fall decorator stuff is everywhere. Nothing else for me to do but start looking for recipes using pumpkin. (I was looking for recipes that combined pumpkin and bananas because we brought back a bunch of bananas from our week in Bella Vista, AR and I needed to make something with them, but I couldn't find anything I thought I wanted to try.) Since the cookie jar was empty I was looking for cookies or maybe muffins that I could try as cookies. 

I found this recipe in my Heritage Country Harvest Cookbook of over 700 favorite recipes from the Amish in Northern Indiana. It must be a popular recipe because it listed two contributors - Mrs. Lester A Beechy and Mary H. Hochstetler. I have made a lot of recipes from this cookbook and I think several were Mary's. Anyway, back to the recipe for Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies. The recipe doesn't say how many cookies it makes, but using 4 cups of flour and 3 cups of oatmeal, I am sure it makes a gazillion - definitely more than I wanted to make. So I basically cup the recipe in half. I say basically because I decided to reduce the brown sugar by a fourth of a cup and because the original recipe calls for 1 egg and who wants to try to cut an egg in half, I decided to just use the egg white. I will share their recipe and then put my portions in parenthesis. How is that?

These have got to be the best ever cookie using pumpkin, oatmeal, and chocolate chips all together. Because of the pumpkin, I would not leave them out for many days. After three days, I put them in the refrigerator to keep them from molding. The only thing is, I don't like them as much cold. The pumpkin is not strong tasting at all. I would suggest, if you have cookies to spare and they are going to last a while, store them in the refrigerator and in the morning take out however many you think you might eat that day and let them come to room temperature. Then you will enjoy that moist, pumpkin and chocolate chip taste. The oatmeal, btw, makes the cookies taste like they contain nuts, but they don't. (I initially put the cookies in my cookie jar in a single layer with wax paper between the layers.)



PUMPKIN OATMEAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES (my version in parenthesis)

1-1/2     cups butter or shortening (3/4 cup butter)
2           cups brown sugar (3/4 cup brown sugar)
1            cup white sugar (1/2 cup sugar
1            egg (1 egg white)
1            teaspoon vanilla (1/2 teaspoon vanilla)
1            pint pumpkin (1 cup canned pumpkin)
3           cups oatmeal (1-1/2 cups old-fashioned oats)
4           cups flour (2 cups flour)
1            teaspoon salt (1/2 teaspoon salt)
2           teaspoons cinnamon (1 teaspoon cinnamon)
2           teaspoons soda (1 teaspoon baking soda)
1-1/2     cups chocolate chips and/or raisins (1 cup 60% cacao - chocolate chips)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.


Cream butter and sugars. (I always slice the butter to make this process go easier.)


Add egg (white) and vanilla.


Stir in pumpkin.


Combine dry ingredients together in another large mixing bowl and
then add them to the mixture.


Add chips.


I used my cookie scoop that holds 1 tablespoon of water to scoop out the dough and placed it on an nonstick cookie sheet with 12 on the sheet. (I recently decided to invest - they actually were not expensive - new cookie sheets that are nonstick. I bought one and liked it so much, I went back to Tuesday Morning and bought another one. I love them so much and clean up is so easy.)


Bake for 10 minutes. (They will still be a little soft, but I baked the second pan for 12 minutes and I personally didn't like the result. They were a dryer cookie.) They don't flatten much.


Cool on wire rack. Store in single layer with wax paper between the layers. If you still have some after several days, you might want to store them in the refrigerator. Just remove and allow cookies to come to room temperature for the best flavor.



No comments:

Post a Comment