Dense, Chewy, and Satisfying: Iced Pumpkin Cookies

Yes, another pumpkin recipe that is out of season.  Pumpkin is so good and available canned that it should be a year-round ingredient.  These cookies definitely shouldn't wait until the fall.

Inspiration

Eat Yourself Skinny! Iced Pumpkin Cookies

I typically change a lot of things about recipes, so it's surprising that I only made a few changes on this one.  I know that baking can be pretty specific, so you don't want to mess around with too much.

Due to my dislike of the taste of cloves (Chai-Spiced Polenta), I used pumpkin pie spice instead of nutmeg and cloves.  And she used Stevia in the Raw while I used regular white sugar.  I also made only half the amount of glaze and it was more than enough. I skipped the butter in the glaze, I figured it wasn't really needed, but I had no idea what I was doing since I've never made a glaze before. I typically go frosting-free on my baked goods, I tend to like them unadulterated.

Ingredients

Cookie

•  1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 2 tsp. ground cinnamon
•  tsp pumpkin pie spice
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 cup nonfat plain Greek yogurt
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 cup canned pumpkin puree
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract

Glaze

• 1 cups confectioners' sugar
• 1.5 Tbsp milk
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• sprinkle of baking spice

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a medium-size bowl mix all of the dry ingredients, flour through salt.  In a larger bowl, mix the wet cookie dough ingredients together, yogurt through vanilla extract.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix just until combined.

Tip: always add the dry ingredients to the wet, if you do it the other way around, you can end up with pockets of flour in the bottom that you have trouble incorporating. 

I used a medium cookie scoop and dropped the dough on to a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.  The recipe didn't indicate if the cookie sheet should be sprayed, plain, etc, so I figured parchment paper would be a good choice.

My dough was rather wet and slightly stick, so I didn't think it was necessary to flatten the dough out as indicated.

I baked the first tray for 15 minutes and of course you have to taste them as soon as they cool enough not too burn.  They seemed perfect and moist, but as they cooled I was afraid that they might get too dried out, so I only baked the rest of them for 14 minutes.

The cookies puffed up but didn't spread, so you can get them pretty close on the cookie sheet. 

When the cookies are done, put them on a cooling rack.

While the cookies are baking, you can mix up the powdered sugar icing. Mix all of the ingredients, but be a little reserved with the liquid since it doesn't take much to make an icing.

When I got to the last little bit of batter, I added a teaspoon of cocoa powder to try a chocolate version.  It didn't have a lot of chocolate flavor though, maybe the cocoa powder didn't have enough time to hydrate or maybe it wasn't enough to flavor the thick batter.

Glazing the cookies was kind of a mess, the icing was rather thin and it ran off the sides onto the counter.  The glaze looked a little anemic, so I double-glazed all of the cookies.  The icing eventually hardened on the cookies enough that I could stack them in a storage container. 

Since the icing had ran off the cookies, the counter under the cooling rack was a sticky mess when I got done.

I wasn't sure if it was ok to leave these out since they've got yogurt in them, so I put them in the fridge.


This recipe made about 66 cookies, which came out to 45 calories.

Verdict

Not too sweet and a little spice, my perfect cookie.

Drippy with spice glaze

I love them, they're a little dense but soft.  They remind me of the Snackwell's Devil's Food cookies that I used to eat in high school.  I'm glad these are low in calorie because I find myself eating several at a time.  Luckily our friend Chuck came over one evening to lend my husband a tool and I sent a bag of cookies home with him, otherwise I would be eating them all the time! 

Nothing gets Sonny D into his chair at the table faster than the question "Do you want a cookie for dessert?"  He loves eating these and I love that they've got whole wheat flour and other healthy ingredients.

After a couple days of eating them, Husband Jeff declared that these are essentially cake doughnuts.  I would agree with that, the texture is thick and almost chewy.  Good call!  I love cake doughnuts, my favorite is a plain cake doughnut with nothing on it, I want to taste the yummy doughnut rather than a load of icing or whatever topping. 

Pumpkin is so neutral that I think you could use this as a base to incorporate other flavors.  I would love to try them with mini chocolate chips in the batter, skip the pumpkin pie spice, and flavor the glaze with orange extract and orange zest.  You could also make a chocolate glaze with either melted chocolate or cocoa powder.  You could also try other flavors of Greek yogurt to enhance them, vanilla and honey would be great to keep it neutral without introducing anything else.  Lemon and orange could take it to a more citrus flavor.   There's even a cafe latte yogurt that might be really good. 

I can't wait to make them again so I can experiment with flavors, but next time I would only make half of the batter since it made a lot of cookies for our little and it's too tempting to keep that many cookies in the house.  Then I would only make a quarter of the glaze.  Or I could make a full batch and take them to work as doughnut cookies, I'm sure they would go fast.