Thursday, November 10, 2005

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

The weekend before Halloween I decided we needed to make some cookies. Silly I know .. right before those bags of sweets come in the door. But I am a slave to my sweet tooth, what can I do...

Last year Pamela and the boys made little goody bags for the close neighbors and delivered them the day before Halloween. So this year Cub was ready to do that again. But of course we were overwhelmed with other things going on and didn't get around to it. So instead Cub and I made cookies.

During the fall we get all "pumpkinfied", and make pie (of course), muffins, cakes and this year, our first cookies. I searched around the web, found a bunch of recipes. I grabbed this one and used it as the base. I made some tweaks to the ingredients and listed them below.


* 1/2 cup shortening
* 1 1/2 cups white sugar
* 1 egg
* 1 cup canned pumpkin
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
* 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets.
2. In a large bowl, cream together the shortening and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg, then stir in the pumpkin and vanilla. Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and cinnamon; gradually mix into the creamed mixture. Stir in the walnuts and chocolate chips. Drop dough by teaspoonfuls onto the prepared cookie sheets.
3. Bake for 15 minutes in the preheated oven, or until light brown. Cool on wire racks.




Changes I made:

Turbinado sugar instead of regular white sugar.
Substituted half of the AP flour with Whole Wheat Flour.
Substituted pecans for walnuts (this is the south!)
Substituted 1/4 cup applesauce for the egg
Added 1/2 a cup of Cinnamon chips (left over from last holiday season! Gasp!)


Oh! and I upped the spices. come on ...1 tsp of Nutmeg and Cinnamon? feh!

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

podcast?

Gonna try podcasting this blog some, see how this works out. Will it just be the recipe? Diatribes on food? I dunno .. stay tuned. I'll put a link up to the right and announce it when it comes.