I love pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. They are my favorite. They are so moist and chewy and the pumpkin and cinnamon make them way better than regular chocolate chip cookies.
Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies are particularly good to eat around Halloween and Thanksgiving for obvious reasons. But I like them so much that I eat them year round. And I find it really hard to only eat one at a time.
Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies usually also have walnuts in them. But since I was so pleased with the outcome of my bacon pumpkin pie a couple weeks ago, I decided it was time to experiment with adding bacon to pumpkin chocolate chip cookies as a substitute for walnuts.
Here’s the recipe:
Bacon Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies
½ c softened butter
1 c sugar
1 c pumpkin
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
5 strips bacon cooked crispy and crumbled
1 c chocolate chips
2 c flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
Mix all ingredients together and drop by spoonfuls onto baking sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.
Icing
½ c brown sugar
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp milk
1 c powdered sugar
Boil the ingredients together for 2 minutes, then allow to cool (mixture will be thin). If the icing is too runny, add more powdered sugar, but don’t add so much powdered sugar that it gets too thick. Keep warm to spread, reheat slightly if the icing starts to set up.
Here’s what the raw cookie mixture looks like – I added the bacon at the end for dramatic effect.
Here’s what the cheerful little mounds look like before they go in the oven.
And here’s the final result!
(I put too much powdered sugar in the frosting this time – yours should look a lot thinner than the frosting in this photo).
You can taste the smokiness of the bacon a lot more when the cookies are warm than you can after they cool off. So be sure to eat a cookie as soon as you take them out of the oven (as if you wouldn’t).
I personally enjoyed the bacon-enhanced pumpkin chocolate chip cookies as much as I enjoyed the bacon pumpkin pie. But I also took a few to work to get second opinions – almost all of the taste testers ate the entire cookie while standing in front of me, and I’m certain those who took them back to their desks also left no crumb behind. The testers commented positively about the smoky flavor that the bacon gave to the cookie, but no one thought the bacon was overwhelming or a distraction. Everyone seemed to enjoy their cookie.
So now that I have another success under my belt, I wonder what else I can make with pumpkin and bacon…