Add A Fall Touch To Your Chocolate Chip Cookies With This Canned Ingredient

As seasonal recipes for mango ice cream and retro icebox cakes fade into summer's rearview, home cooks might want to make the calendar's current desserts all the more topical. Plenty of perennial ingredients vie for fall flavor supremacy, but few do so quite as colorfully as pumpkin. Before you roll your eyes at the nation's most overexposed gourd, we're not going to limit you to pumpkin spice. 

In fact, the pure, relatively unadulterated taste of canned pumpkin puree can be a welcome addition to many autumn recipes. While pumpkin pie filling comes pre-seasoned with things like nutmeg, clove, ginger, cinnamon, and allspice, pumpkin puree should contain the squash alone. This is also why pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie filling are not interchangeable. Added to the brown sugar, vanilla extract, and semisweet chips in your standard chocolate chip cookie recipe, the pumpkin puree will add a unique twist to your dessert. At the very least, it's a deviation from the "pumpkin spice-on-everything" mentality that seems to reign this time of year.

In a perfect world, you'd be able to use a whole can of pumpkin puree in your chocolate chip cookies without hacking the remainder into recipes where it may not belong. Depending on how much pumpkin flavor you desire, you'll only need around half of a 15-ounce can for a batch of 20 to 30 cookies. The more puree there is, the more you'll need to adjust the recipe to prevent sogginess.

To make up for the extra moisture, you'll likely need to increase the flour content and baking soda. Add the flour a few tablespoons at a time to ensure that your cookie dough reaches its expected consistency without crumbling. Some pumpkin cookie recipes also eliminate the egg in an effort to calibrate the wet and dry ingredients, while others reduce the puree on the stovetop to deplete some of the moisture. 

While baking these cookies doesn't have to be a pumpkin spice-based affair, it feels necessary to mention the spicy possibilities. A bit of the versatile cinnamon or nutmeg can more gently ease the treats into that capital "PS" category. Spooned onto a baking sheet like usual, your pumpkin chocolate chip cookies should be done after 10 minutes at around 375 degrees Fahrenheit.