Soft Pumpkin Cookies with Chocolate Chips

Tall, domed, and golden, with a crumb closer to a muffin top than a crisp cookie and pools of melted semi-sweet chocolate running through it. This is the soft pumpkin cookie recipe for when you want tender rather than chewy.

The spice stays gentle and the pumpkin is subtle, which is why they work for people who usually find pumpkin desserts too much.

Scroll down for the ingredients and step-by-step.

Why You’ll Love This Soft Pumpkin Cookie Recipe

• No chilling and no rolling. You scoop the dough straight onto the sheet, so the first tray is out of the oven about half an hour after you start mixing.
• One batch makes 24, which covers a bake sale table or a week of lunchboxes.
• They stay soft for days instead of going brittle overnight.
• Cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger go in separately, so you can dial any one of them up without buying a blend.

When and Who This Is For

This is the kind of soft pumpkin cookie recipe you make on a grey Saturday when you want the house to smell like cinnamon and you are not in the mood for anything fussy.

It suits people who find most pumpkin desserts a bit much. The pumpkin here sits in the background rather than taking the headline, so what you get reads as a soft spiced cookie with chocolate in it, which is useful if you are baking for someone who says they do not really like pumpkin.

One thing to know before you start: these are made with butter and a whole egg, so they are not dairy free, egg free, or vegan. If that is what you need, my vegan pumpkin chocolate chip cookies are the same idea built on oil and cornstarch instead.

Ingredients

• 1 cup (2 sticks / 227 g) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup (200 g) granulated sugar
• 1 cup (213 g) brown sugar, packed
• ½ cup (122 g) pumpkin puree, canned or homemade
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 cups (360 g) all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• ½ teaspoon ground ginger
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (170 g) chocolate chips

Butter. Take it out well ahead. It needs 30 to 60 minutes on the counter to soften properly, and there is no shortcut worth taking. Microwaving it even briefly starts melting the fat, and melted butter cannot hold the air that creaming builds. That trapped air is most of the reason these rise instead of spreading flat.

Pumpkin puree. Check that the can says pure pumpkin and nothing else. Pumpkin pie filling sits right next to it on the shelf and looks almost identical, but it arrives already sweetened and spiced, and it would throw off both the sugar and the spice here. If you are using homemade puree, drain it on a couple of paper towels first, because fresh puree carries noticeably more water than canned and extra water makes an already soft dough hard to scoop. Half a cup is all you need, so most of the can is left over for something else.

Chocolate chips. I used semi-sweet, which keeps things from tipping too sweet alongside two full cups of sugar. Milk chocolate works if you like it sweeter, dark if you want more contrast against the spice. Either way they melt into soft pools rather than staying as firm little dots.

The spices. A teaspoon of cinnamon with half a teaspoon each of nutmeg and ginger is a gentle hand on purpose. You get warmth rather than a spice blast, which is part of what makes these read as a cookie first and a pumpkin thing second.

How to Make Pumpkin Cookies That Stay Soft

1. Heat the oven to 350°F (175°C) and line your baking sheets with parchment.
2. Cream the softened butter with both sugars until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Give this three or four minutes with a mixer rather than stopping the moment it looks combined, since this is where the lift comes from. Add the pumpkin puree, egg and vanilla, and mix until smooth. The mixture may look slightly curdled at this stage, which is normal and sorts itself out once the flour goes in.

3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and salt. Whisking rather than tipping it all in matters here, because there are two leaveners and three spices to distribute evenly through three cups of flour.

4. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture gradually, stirring until just combined. Stop as soon as you can no longer see dry flour, since overmixing develops gluten and these are meant to be tender. Fold in the chocolate chips last.

5. Scoop the dough onto the lined sheets, spacing them about 2 inches (5 cm) apart. The dough should be soft and a little sticky, and a spoon leaves you with uneven mounds that bake at different rates, so I really do recommend scooping instead. Six to a sheet is about right, so the full batch runs to four sheets.

6. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are lightly golden. The centers will still look underdone, and that is exactly when to pull them out. They carry on setting on the hot pan, and two extra minutes in the oven is the difference between tender and dry. If you have two sheets going at once, swap their positions halfway through.

7. Leave them on the sheet for 5 minutes before moving anything. Straight out of the oven they are too soft to lift cleanly and a spatula will drag right through the bottom. After five minutes they hold their shape and you can move them to a wire rack.

8. Serve them warm while the chocolate is still molten, or let them cool completely before storing.

Tips and Variations

If you want more spice, add it. The spicing here is deliberately restrained, so an extra half teaspoon of cinnamon, or a quarter teaspoon of cloves or allspice alongside what is already there, warms things up without touching the structure. What I would not do is add more pumpkin puree to chase flavor. Pumpkin is mostly water, and more of it just loosens the dough past the point where it holds a scoop.

Freeze the dough in scooped balls. Scoop the whole batch onto a lined sheet, freeze until the balls are solid (about an hour), then bag them. They keep for three months and bake straight from frozen with a couple of extra minutes. This is the make-ahead version I actually use, because it turns one afternoon of mixing into six warm cookies on a Tuesday rather than twenty-four all at once on a Sunday.

On frosting. Soft pumpkin cookies often get finished with cream cheese frosting. These already have chocolate running through them, so I leave them bare, and it means they travel in a tin without smudging. If you do want frosting, let them cool completely first or it will slide straight off.

Ways to Use These Cookies

• On a bake sale or cookie exchange table. They hold their shape in a box, the tops are not sticky, and 24 fills a tray.
• In lunchboxes through the week. One packed on Monday is still soft on Thursday.
• On the Thanksgiving dessert table, next to the pies, for anyone who would rather eat with their hands.
• Alongside a hot drink. The muffin-top texture makes them read almost like a breakfast pastry, and a tray of chocolate chip pumpkin cookies goes very well with a mug of coffee softened by homemade pumpkin spice creamer.
• On a fall party spread, where handheld beats anything that needs a fork.

Questions You May Have About These Cookies

Related Recipes

• Homemade Hot Chocolate with Chocolate Chips. The drink these want to sit next to on a cold afternoon.

• Homemade Pumpkin Spice Coffee Creamer. Make a jar at the start of the week and your coffee is sorted for as long as the cookies last.

• Best Fall Coffee Recipes. Seven more ways to get fall into a mug, from pumpkin spice lattes to a London Fog.

A Good Reason to Turn the Oven On

There is something about a batch of these cooling on the counter that makes a house feel settled. Twenty-four cookies is a generous number, which means most of them end up somewhere else: a neighbor’s kitchen, a tin at work, a lunchbox on Thursday. That is really the appeal of an easy pumpkin cookie recipe like this one. Bake it once and you have something to hand out all week.

Save this to Pinterest so it is waiting for you when the first properly cold morning arrives. 🍂