Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

I made these for a friend's birthday when she requested chocolate chip cookies.  We're well into autumn here in Alaska, so a pumpkin twist seemed nice!  This recipe comes from the blog Two Twenty One.  Typical of me, I changed things a tiny smidge.  The recipe says to mix the baking soda with a teaspoon of milk.  That's something I'd never heard of, so I skipped that step and just added the baking soda with the dry ingredients and left out the milk.  I also streamlined the prep a little.

These cookies are super fast and easy to make.  No creaming ingredients together, no thinking ahead to take butter out of the fridge to soften.  You end up with a batter rather than a dough and just plop dollops of batter on a cookie sheet instead of making balls.  I used a 1 1/2 tablespoon cookie scoop to scoop the batter.  Funny thing is the lady who wrote the recipe used the exact same scoop, but somehow got 6 more cookies?  Not sure how that happened!  Guess I just make big cookies.

We really liked these cookies.  They are soft and cakey and pillowy, like blobs of the fluffiest pumpkin bread you've ever had, but studded with a rather obscene amount with chocolate chips.  The cookies themselves are not excessively sugary, all things considered, but the chocolate chips bring the perfect amount of sweetness.  They are also extremely cute, fat little things in the cheeriest shade of orange!  Next time I'm going to experiment with using spelt flour, which bakes up lighter than whole wheat.  I think the texture and flavor of spelt would mesh well with everything about this cookie.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 C white sugar
1 C canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
1/2 C canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
2 C flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
2 C chocolate chips

Mix together sugar, pumpkin, oil, vanilla, and egg until well combined.  Add remaining ingredients, except chocolate chips.  Mix until combined.  Stir in chocolate chips.

Set batter aside to rest for 15 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350.  Drop 1 1/2 tablespoon blobs of dough onto the prepared cookie sheets, leaving 2 inches between cookies.  Bake until lightly golden, about 10-15 minutes, depending on your oven.

These are rather delicate cookies, so let them cool 15 minutes on the baking sheets before transferring them to cooling racks.

Yield:  2 1/2 dozen cookies