Iced Pumpkin Cookies

After reading my cousin James blog today I was left with my mouth watering and a strong desire to make some cookies! I put some butter on the counter to soften and continued on with my day. After dinner the sweet tooth returned and while I originally planned on making Chocolate Chip Cookies I settled for a delicious Iced Pumpkin Cookie I got from my mom. She had found it online and we've tweaked it a bit to our liking. These are one of my favorite recipe's. They are SUPER soft, fluffy, and one of the lighter cookies you can make. They can easily be modified to your liking and are delicious with or without icing. Lastly, they freeze great and taste just as soft and delicious after they are thawed. They are also fantastic cold!! Enjoy :)

First you need a helper; preferably one that has a LOT of enthusiasm for baking.


Next, we gathered all of our ingredients.
1 c. whole wheat flour
1 c. white flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp ground cinnamon
.5 tsp ground nutmeg
.5 tsp ground cloves
.5 tsp salt

.5 c (1 stick) butter, softened
1.5 c white sugar ***
1 c canned pumpkin
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract

Yields approximately 3 dozen

*** Since I doubled my recipe (yields 6 doz) I used 2 c white sugar and 3/4 Honey - I could not tell the difference.




Next,
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, ground cloves, and salt; set aside.

2. In a medium mixing bowl, cream together the 1/2 c of butter and white sugar. Add pumpkin, egg and 1 tsp vanilla to butter mixture and beat until creamy. Mix in dry ingredients.



3.Drop on cookie sheet by tablespoonsfull; flatten slightly (I don't really do that).


4. Bake for 15 minutes (I prefer 14 min with my oven) in the preheated oven.


5. Cool cookies and then drizzle glaze with fork.

To Make Glaze: Combine 2 cups powdered sugar, 3 Tbl milk, 1 Tbl melted butter and 1 tsp Vanilla Extract. Add milk as needed to achieve drizzling consistency.




At this point, admire your beautiful cookies, eat a dozen of them while typing up a blog post and drinking a cold glass of milk.



Note on Icing: You can see from the photo's how much icing I put on the cookies (this is after eating about a dozen of them before I iced them). This is one single batch of icing to a double batch of cookies. So if you were to make 1.5 times the recipe you should have plenty.

A big thank you to my adorable little helper. After the first batch came out of the oven he said he wanted to help me make the icing. It was almost 8:00 at this point and I told him I thought he had stayed up late enough but he could eat one with icing on it in the morning. He said to me "That's okay mom. Thanks for letting me stay up this late". Of course I squealed with delight, covered him in kisses, told him how proud I was of him for handling my response and I gave him a couple cookies and a glass of milk. I love this little guy!!