Gingerbread Pumpkin Cookies Recipe (White Chocolate icing)

These pumpkin cookies are fun and so yummy! With an easy white chocolate icing that decorates them and makes these cookies very festive. They are great for all your fall and winter holiday parties and gatherings.

Ingredients for Pumpkin Cookies

Pumpkin Puree

You can use canned pumpkin or fresh pumpkin for this recipe. I like to cook a pumpkin or two at the beginning of the fall season and freeze my pumpkin puree for all my pumpkin recipes throughout the festive months. If you are using a whole pumpkin check out my post on how to make pumpkin puree.

Flour

In most of my recipes I like to use 1/2 all purpose 1/2 whole wheat but for these cookies I choose to use 100% All Purpose Flour. All purpose has a much lighter texture insuring a the soft, light texture to our cookie. Whole wheat flours can make them more dense and may not meet your dessert expectations.

Brown Sugar

Brown sugar is our sweetener. It is important to use brown sugar for it molasses content. We will also be adding additional molasses so if you don’t have brown sugar you and simply substitute with regular granulated sugar or Monk Fruit Sweetener and double the amount of molasses the recipe calls for.

I like to use organic cane sugar from Azure Standard. If you’ve never heard from azure standard before you should check our my Azure Standard Review to learn more.

To Learn more about how to make brown sugar here is my recipes

Butter

Because of the pumpkin puree we will use about 1/2 of the normal amount of butter that you would normally see in a cookie recipe. This produces more of a soft cake like cookie rather than a chewy cookie.

Eggs

Eggs help our cookie from crumbling. They help holds everything together and is a part of the rising action and helps determine the crumbliness or chewiness of your cookie. This recipe calls for two eggs. But after reading “Cookie Science: How Do Eggs Affect My Cookies?” I might try double yoke and one white instead of 2 whole eggs. For now I’m keeping it simple also cause it works. 2 eggs.

Molasses

Molasses is a rich in nutrient, color, and flavor, thick syrup that we get from sugar cane. I use blackstrap molasses for its nutrient benefits in smoothie, pasta sauces, chili, breakfast muffins, and more. Although we have molasses in our brown sugar I added more to enrich the flavor and texture of this cookie while adding extra nutrients and taking out a little saturated fats by using less butter than normal.

Baking Soda and Baking Powder

This recipe calls for both baking soda and baking powder. Baking soda is activated as soon as it is mixed in with another acidic ingredient. In our case, brown sugar BUT because the brown sugar and butter is mixed together first the baking soda and acidic brown sugar will not activate until the butter melt from around the brown sugar.

The baking powder is also activated at the mixing point but also has some agents in it that need heat to insure activation. So although baking soda and baking powder are very similar we find that one is activated more by acidity and the other is activated more by heat.

Vanilla

I like to use vanilla powder rather than extract. You can find the vanilla powder on amazon. This powder is a 1:1 ratio for vanilla extract so you don’t have to do any extra math when substituting. I like the flavor a lot and its been a great addition to my pantry.

Spices

Our spices include cinnamon, ginger, all-spice. These spices add so much flavor and you can easily adjust the amounts and create a whole new flavor. If you favor one flavor over the other you can experiment by adding a extra 1/4 teaspoon to the spice you want to stand out. Reduce another spice you want to be more subtle then the others.

Salt

Enhance the flavor with good salt like Redmond Real Salt. If you are looking for a unrefined natural salt with multiple minerals and electrolytes harvested in the United States of America, then look no further. Redmond Real Salt is full of flavor and nutrients and harvested out of the ancient seabed deep beneath Central Utah.

How To Make Gingerbread Molasses Cookies

Mix Butter & Brown Sugar

In a large bowl or stand mixer, mix soft butter and brown sugar together. This is important to the chemical reaction that we want to get a perfect cookie.

Add Wet ingredients

Add pumpkin puree, eggs and molasses to the butter and sugar mixture and combine thoroughly.

Add Dry Ingredients

Next, add the four, spices and baking soda and powder.

Refrigerate

Once the cookie dough is all mixed together refrigerate for a least 30 minutes, 1 hour is best. We want to refrigerate so that the dough is easy to roll into a ball. If the cookies are not clean round balls they will look a little messy and bumpy and hard to frost with the white chocolate icing.

Form and Bake

Take spoon or cookie scoop and form a nice clean round cookie dough ball. At this point you can dip into cinnamon and sugar before baking or just leave plain. If you don’t plan on making the white chocolate icing then I do think you should roll it in some cinnamon and sugar.

Bake in the oven for 8 minutes at 350 degrees.

Ingredients for White Chocolate Icing

White chocolate chips

You can also use white chocolate baking squares or bars but white chocolate chips work really well too.

Milk

White chocolate does not melt the same way as regular coco chocolate chips. White chocolate likes to stay thick and need the milk to help smooth it out and make it spreadable.

Butter

Butter also help the white chocolate chips break down to something more workable without adding to much liquid.

Make While Chocolate Icing.

In a sauce pan on medium high heat melt the white chocolate chips, butter and milk together. do not let it boil, just get it hot and melted and smooth.

Take off the heat and dip the cookies into the white chocolate and let cool on a cooling rack. Or you can take a fork or spoon and drizzle the icing on the cookies for fun designs.

If you white chocolate cools down to fast it will not be workable. Simply reheat and continue to drizzle or dip your cookies.