HOLIDAY RECIPES: Cake-like pumpkin cookies subtly sweet dessert

DANIEL CLIFTON • PICAYUNE EDITOR

MARBLE FALLS — My 5-year-old son, Zach, loves candy, but he’s not a big pumpkin fan. So when he scrunched up his face after taking a bite of a pumpkin cookie fresh out of the oven and then gingerly placed it back on the rack, I took it more as a sign of his fickleness than as a critique of my baking.

One day he loves pizza, the next he won’t give it a second look. Pumpkin, however, never sat high on his list.

“Oh, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” my mom said, then added in her blunt German way, “They’re good.”

Ah, the seal of approval from a woman who knows her way around the kitchen and isn’t afraid to tell you when something stinks.

My foray into the kitchen came as an idea to get ready for Thanksgiving. I’m not a cook or a baker by any means. I make a mean peanut butter sandwich for my son Luke’s lunch, and I scrape together breakfasts on most days for the two boys (though I’ve been known to whip up some pancakes from time to time), but I still struggle when it comes to figuring out the abbreviations for teaspoon and tablespoon. So I thought maybe I could offer up some recipes that other people might try with the view of, “If he can do it, then it can’t be all that tough.”

I’ll take that as a compliment.

But where would I get the recipes and insights?

Burnet County AgriLife Extension Agent Linda Sue Wells jumped at helping me. She’s a family and consumer science specialist in the Burnet office, and she knows how to cook. I say this confidently because over the past several years, I’ve attended a couple of her workshops, and she knows her stuff as well as pretty much any of the folks you see on TV.

“I’ve got a lot of great recipes for the holidays,” she said over the phone. “Do you want …”

OK, about this time I was beginning to have second thoughts. She mentioned something about a pumpkin stew with you actually cooking the concoction in a pumpkin. This sounded a bit over my head. Fortunately, it was a Friday, and I needed a quick turn around, so she offered up her pumpkin cookie recipe.

“Oh, this is easy, and they’re great,” she said.

A few minutes later, I was gleaning over the ingredients wondering why you’d have salt and sugar in the same recipe. It seems the two would cancel each other out. But I went for it anyway.

My wife, Sheri, helped me collect the ingredients (FYI: “Allspice” doesn’t mean mixing all the spices in the kitchen cupboard together) before saying, “You can do this at your mom’s house on Sunday.”

Apparently, she held some concerns about my cooking in her kitchen.

So after church, the boys and I loaded up and headed for to mom’s house with ingredients in hand — minus the egg, chopped nuts and vanilla. Mom would supply those.

Now Linda’s recipe calls for two cups of sugar and four cups of flour, so Sheri recommended cutting the recipe and ingredients in half. I reluctantly agreed, but grew a bit concerned that this would require dividing fractions. Fortunately, Linda’s recipe came in whole numbers.

No fractions here.

Once I collected all the ingredients and assembled the bowl, measuring spoons and cups and other baking paraphernalia on my mom’s kitchen counter, I went to work. First “cream sugar and shortening until thoroughly mixed,” stated the recipe.

“Huh,” I said. “Cream it?”

“Just mix it,” my mom said shaking her head. She was probably beginning to see why Sheri didn’t want this experiment to happen in her kitchen.

At this point, I would recommend anybody using this recipe to use an electric mixer. No Luddites need apply for this baking excursion because I’m pretty sure had I attempted to mix this all by hand, I’d be mixing until Christmas.

Of 2015.

One thing I did have to do by hand, well kind of, was chop the pecans. The recipe calls for a cup of chopped nuts (half in my case) but didn’t specify which type. Being this is Texas and Thanksgiving is approaching, I went with pecans. Mom, sensing she had somebody to do the heavy hitting pulled out her Slap Chop (yeah, she really has one) and had me chop up half a bag of pecans — well beyond my required half a cup.

“Well, I’m going to probably do some baking soon, so I might as well have you chop them all,” she said.

Linda was correct, the recipe is pretty straight forward. Gather ingredients, mix them up, add the nuts, heat the oven and place dollops of the cookie dough on cookie sheets. Then place in oven for prescribed time.

“These are drop cookies,” Linda explained when she told me about he recipe. That means, you drop a teaspoon of dough on the cookie sheet, no need for fancy cooking squeezers or even mashing the dough down with a fork. Just drop it in rows and go.

The only “experimenting” I did was play around a bit with the baking time. Linda’s recipe calls for baking at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes. My mom’s oven bakes a little hot, so I started it a bit below 350 degrees. Eventually I found that her oven at 345 and 15 minutes seemed to work the best.

After I placed the first batch on the table for cooling, my mom tried one.

“Good,” she said. “They’re like a cake cookie, light and like a cake.”

And she was right. Linda’s pumpkin cookies came out in nice round forms with a light flavor, but you can definitely taste the pumpkin. They aren’t sweet enough for Zach’s overexcited sweet tooth but fall in just right for Luke, who had three or four before we knew it.

As for me, I find they make a great addition when sitting down with a cup of coffee on a cool evening.

Now with one recipe under my belt, let’s see what Linda digs out of her recipe file for next week.

daniel@thepicayune.com

PUMPKIN COOKIES

(from Linda Sue Wells)

Ingredients (for full recipe)

• 2 cups sugar
• 2 cups shortening
• 1 can pumpkin (16 ounces)
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 cup chopped nuts
• 4 cups of flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 4 teaspoons allspice
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 2 teaspoons baking powder

Directions: Cream sugar and shortening until thoroughly mixed. Add pumpkin and vanilla and egg. Mix dry ingredients together and add to sugar mixture. Stir in nuts. Drop by teaspoon on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 12-15 minutes at 350 degrees. Enjoy.