Pumpkin and spice and all things nice...

That's what fall is made of.

While it may officially be fall, one is hardpressed to find the evidence in some parts of the west coast, so I decided to awaken my olefactory senses to the present season and make something warm and spicey. I searched far and wide for something with pumpkin as the star ingredient, and I happened upon a wonderful-sounding, cake-like, pumpkin spice cookie topped with icing. Could it get any better?

I have never made anything with pumpkin before, so the grocery shopping experience was somewhat new. I spent about 10 minutes browsing the canned vegetable isle looking for pureed pumpkin. To my dismay, it was not there. So on a whim, I decided to browse the baking section and buy the ingredients available there and search elsewhere for pumpkin. Lo and behold, I came across the pumpkin! It was in the baking isle, next to the pie crusts. I suppose this grocery store presumes that one only requires pumpkin for pumpkin pie. I will have to take this up with the manager at some point.

On to the cookies... http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Iced-Pumpkin-Cookies/Detail.aspx?prop31=6

With ingredients in hand, I began my first-ever pumpkin anything. The recipe is pretty easy to follow and similar to many others, except for the cup of pumpkin tossed into the wet ingredients, so I didn't have any difficulty with preparation. The resulting batter was more liquidy than expected for a cookie batter, but that results in the cake-like texture of the final product. I wasn't quite sure how to check for done-ness, so I kept the first batch in for closer to 20 minutes, and they began to brown slightly. The other batches stayed in for closer to 15 minutes. While the oven did it's thing, I made the simple icing recipe that accompanied the cookie recipe. I appreciate that you could add more/less depending on the type of consistency you prefer or if you add more than you should have and need to correct. All recipes should be as forgiving.

When the cookies cooled, I placed the cookie rack on top of a baking sheet (to catch the excess icing) and drizzled the icing on top. Quite fun.

And this is the final product:



They were spicey and cake-like as the recipe suggests. And my husband, an adamant pumpkin-disliker, took a fancy to the cookie. The icing was a necessary accompaniment, and the pumpkin, while definitely there, was not overly powerful. A definite fall must-do.