If you love pumpkin pie but wish you could eat it in cookie form, this recipe is for you. The trick here is reducing the pumpkin puree on the stovetop first, which concentrates its flavor and gets rid of excess moisture — the result is a soft, chewy cookie with a gooey center that tastes remarkably like the inside of a pumpkin pie, especially with pockets of melty white chocolate throughout.
Yield: about 10 cookies
What You’ll Need
- ½ cup (120 g) pumpkin puree
- 4½ tablespoons (64 g) unsalted butter
- 1 teaspoon (2.6 g) ground cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon (1 g) ground ginger
- ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg (fresh or powdered)
- ⅛ teaspoon ground cloves
- ½ cup (100 g) granulated sugar
- ¼ cup (53 g) brown sugar
- ¼ teaspoon (1.5 g) baking soda
- ¼ teaspoon (0.67 g) kosher salt
- ¾ cup (90 g) all-purpose flour
- 2–3 oz (85 g) white chocolate chips or discs
Don’t have all four individual spices on hand? You can swap the cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves for 2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice instead.
How To Make Them
Preheat and prep. Heat your oven to 350°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Reduce the pumpkin puree. Add the pumpkin puree to a small saucepan and cook it over medium heat, stirring every so often. You’re looking for it to cook down by almost half, which usually takes 4 to 6 minutes. As it reduces, the puree will get noticeably thicker and darker in color. You should end up with roughly 75 g of concentrated puree — don’t stress if it’s a bit more or less than that.
Stir in the butter and spices. Take the pan off the heat and add the butter, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves directly into the warm pumpkin. Stir until the butter has fully melted and the spices are evenly worked in.
Cool the mixture and build the dough. Move the pumpkin mixture into a separate bowl — this helps it cool down faster so it doesn’t melt your chocolate later. Stir in the granulated sugar and brown sugar until fully combined, then mix in the baking soda and salt. Finally, fold in the flour, stopping just before it’s fully incorporated (a few dry streaks left is exactly what you want).
Add the chocolate. Gently fold the white chocolate chips or discs into the dough.
Scoop and bake. Using a #20 cookie scoop (about 3 tablespoons of dough per cookie), portion out roughly 10 cookies. Bake them in two batches of 5–6, spacing them 2 to 3 inches apart on the pan — they won’t spread much during baking. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes, until the cookies smell fragrant, look golden brown, and are set around the edges with a center that’s mostly matte rather than shiny.
Cool before digging in. If the centers still look slightly wet when you pull them from the oven, that’s okay — they’ll keep cooking a bit from residual heat while they sit. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for at least 10 minutes before enjoying.
There’s something about the smell of these baking — warm spice curling through the kitchen, butter and pumpkin mingling in the oven — that feels like autumn distilled into a single cookie. Pull them from the oven while the edges are set but the centers still hold a little secret of softness, and let that first bite remind you why pumpkin season is worth the wait every single year. Whether you’re making these for a cozy night in, a holiday cookie swap, or just because the leaves are turning, one thing’s for sure: the batch won’t last long.
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