I found this recipe at the always inventive Baking Bites – I’ve never had a failure with her cookie and cupcake recipes, and as she described, these cookies were moist and slightly chewy without being cakey or overly dense.

I’d never actually used pumpkin in a sweet baking recipe before – it’s more of an American cooking quirk than an Australian one, although we do have pumpkin scones here in the Antipodes.  I usually eat pumpkin in salads, and when I read this recipe I had just roasted some small pieces of pumpkin, skin on, to have for lunch during the week.  I simply scraped a cup full of the soft pumpkin from the skin, and used that pumpkin in this recipe – I think the roasting gave it the biscuits a bit of extra warmth.

I didn’t use the optional nuts mentioned by Baking Bites as I didn’t have any in the cupboard, but I think they’d give a nice crunch to these soft biscuits.

ingredients:

2 1/2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
pinch nutmeg
1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup pureed pumpkin
1 cup dark chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line your baking trays with baking paper, to prevent the biscuits sticking.

Sift or stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and spices in a bowl.

In a large bowl, cream together (either with an electric beater or by hand) the butter and sugar. Beat in the egg, vanilla, and lastly the pumpkin. Add the flour mixture and stir in by hand until just incorporated. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Drop tablespoonfulls of the biscuit mixture onto your baking trays, and baking for 12-14 minutes at 180C until slightly browned at the edges. Don’t worry if they’re a little soft – they will continue to cook and firm up as they cool on the tray.