Pumpkin Cranberry Cookies

It took a little while, but it's finally fall. Big time, fall. With the holidays seemingly coming in during beach season, and the weather staying a perfect-for-outdoor-drinks 70 degrees for, like, 3 weeks after we finally got back to 5-day work weeks (what is up with a 3-day yuntif, anyway??), it seemed like fall would never hit. And now it has.....which I'm actually excited about! I am thrilled to finally get to break out my scarves and sweaters and boots! Ah, so many boots :-)

Anyway, if you've seen, pretty much, any post on this blog, you know that I love pumpkin. I love that it's not too sweet, I love that it pairs with spicy flavors like cinnamon and nutmeg, and I love that anytime I make a pumpkin pie, I immediately think of my family and celebrating my father's birthday with his favorite dessert.

When I hosted Shabbos dinner last week for friends, I made a chocolate dessert - an intensely chocolate dessert. It was a "brownie pudding," which is another way of saying "a totally underdone chocolate lava cake that you serve warm and oozey with whipped cream on top." Totally easy and totally decadent, but totally not my speed. I'm just not a chocolate person. Pair it with peanut butter, and I'm good to go. But on its own? Meh. I need something else to counterbalance the overly rich chocolate fudginess. Pumpkin is my go-to flavor for fall, and since I had just been to Costco two nights earlier and bought the largest bag of Craisins ever (hey, the huge bag at Costco costs less than the regular bag at the supermarket! Totally worth it), I decided on pumpkin cookies with cranberries.

Now, baking needs to be precise (cooking is an art, baking is a science) - more precise than I generally am. So I decided to follow a recipe.....well, sort of. I found a recipe that just seemed...meh. So-so. So I doctored it up, made a few substitutions here and there, thought I screwed up the entire thing, and then ended up loving the results. The cookies have this very deep spicy flavor, with lots of pumpkin in there, and they are ridiculously soft. I've had leftovers slowly depleting in my apartment for a week now and they're still little pillows of goodness all these days later. I would normally not post someone else's recipe, but since I took so many liberties, they're mine now :-)

Cranberry White Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Cookies
makes approximately 30 cookies

1/2 cup margarine (1 stick), softened 

2/3 cup white sugar  

1/3 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 egg

1 cup canned pumpkin puree

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp. baking powder 

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

1/2 tsp. ginger

1 cup dried cranberries

3/4 cup white chocolate chips 

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2. In a large mixing bowl, cream margarine and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in vanilla, egg and pumpkin. 

3. Add 1 cup of flour and mix until incorporated. Add remaining flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger and mix until fully incorporated. Cut the cranberries in half and stir into mixture along with the white chocolate chips. The dough will be sticky, but if you allow it to rest for about 5 minutes, it eases up. 

4. Drop rounded tablespoons on a greased cookie sheet and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, flattening the cookies halfway through the baking and rotating the cookie sheet. They should  be very soft when they come out of the oven. Flatten them lightly one more time as soon as they come out of the oven.

*Editor's note: These cookies don't spread very much and they're a little too puffy for my liking, which is why I flatten them twice. If you want a very puffy cookie, don't bother - they're still delicious, and they will "fall" a bit overnight after you've baked them.