Pumpkin Spice Halloween Cookies

This post is also available in（こちらの言語版もある）: Japanese

The sugar cookies I made up until now were pretty good: cute, fairly easy to make, and pretty tasty…for sugar cookies anyway. However, sugar cookies are kind of boring in the flavor department and I wasn’t sure anyone really wanted to eat another whole batch this year. And while “pumpkin spice” may not be a trend here, it’s inescapable in the West once the calendar hits October 1st, so all of the pumpkin spice lattes, Poptarts, and even M&Ms popping up in my Facebook newsfeed made me want to jump on the pumpkin spice bandwagon and switch up this year’s cookie recipe.

I’ve made both sugar and ginger cut-out cookies before so I thought I had a pretty good idea in terms of what works for me. For instance, most recipes say “chill 1 hour-overnight” but my fridge must be on the warm side as anything less than overnight yields dough too sticky to cut out. So with that in mind, I made the dough for the pumpkin spice cookies one night and refrigerated them until I got home the next night, thinking they’d be properly chilled. I was wrong. Either this dough is just plain stickier or my substituting real unsalted butter with the “baking margarine” they sell in Japan finally proved to be a grave mistake (real butter is very expensive here and even becomes hard to find sometimes so I do make this substitution occasionally) because the dough was too damn sticky and stuck to everything no matter how much a floured the rolling pin, cutters, board, etc. I ended up dumping it all in the freezer and only taking out a small amount at a time to work with at a time while keeping the rest in the freezer. It was still a bit difficult to work with, but with enough flour the metal cookie cutters I own got the job done.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t firm enough to reliably get very many cookies out of these cool double-sided cutters a friend brought me back from the US. I did get at least one pumpkin and one skull sandwich out the dough that sat in the freezer the longest and filled them with some leftover absinthe frosting that I had in my freezer, which went surprisingly well with the spice flavor from the cookies.

All in all, these cookies ended up being a bit more work and frustration than I had anticipated, but the end result was so much more interesting and delicious than standard sugar cookies that I would like to try this recipe again and hopefully not during a butter shortage so I can rule out whether or not that was the problem. Moreover, the frosting is definitely a lot softer and better tasting than royal icing or the like, so rejoice all ye royal icing haters. However, because it doesn’t get as hard as some other types of icing, it’s a little harder to transport these in say, a typhoon like I did. That said, the people at the work that I fed these to did not seem to care one bit that some of the decorations were a little squished and gobbled up plenty of these. The fellow foreigners present were also overjoyed to finally be able to get their pumpkin spice fix.

Pumpkin Spice Halloween Cookies

 

Print（印刷）

Prep time（準備時間）

12 hours（時）

Cook time（加熱時間）

9 mins（分）

Total time（合計時間）

12 hours（時） 9 mins（分）

 

A pumpkin spice twist on classic cut-out sugar cookies that is perfect for Halloween.

Author（投稿者）: Xiomara Entropy (adapted from Sweet Pea's Kitchen)

Recipe type（レシピカテゴリ）: Dessert

Cuisine（どこの料理）: American

Serves（何人分）: about 24 cookies

Ingredients （材料）

• For cookies:
• 2 cups (256g) of all-purpose flour
• ½ tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt
• 2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (see "Notes" section for how to make your own!)
• 1 cup (~200g) unsalted butter, softened but not completely room temperature ("baking margarine" may be too soft to use with this recipe, but if you must use it, expect to have to freeze the dough a bit)
• 1 cup (201 g) granulated sugar
• 1 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1½ tsp vanilla extract
• For the icing:
• 4 cups (512 g) powdered sugar
• ¼ cup and 1 Tbsp (65ml) cream
• ½ cup (113g) butter
• 2 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions（作り方）

1. Make cookies: In a medium bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, and pumpkin pie spice--set aside.
2. In a large bowl, cream together butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar with an electric hand mixer (or stand mixer if you have one) on medium speed until light and fluffy (scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed).
3. Add egg and vanilla and beat together on medium speed until combined.
4. Add the dry ingredients from the first step and beat on low speed until combined (scrape down the sides of bowl as needed)
5. Shape dough into a disk, wrap with plastic wrap, and refrigerate at least overnight.
6. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.
7. Remove about ¼ of the dough from the refrigerator onto a floured surface, cover with parchment paper, and use a rolling pin to roll it out to ¼ inch thickness. Remove parchment paper, use floured cookie cutters to cut out cookies, and place on prepared baking sheets. **If dough is still too sticky to easily roll and cut out, put it in the freezer until it firms up enough to work with and keep the dough you are not currently working with in there until you are ready to roll it out**
8. Repeat the previous step until all of the dough has been rolled and cut out.
9. Put baking sheets full of cookies in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes before baking and preheat oven to 375F (190C).
10. Bake cookies 8-9 minutes until the edges start to turn slightly brown. Cool completely on a rack before decorating.
11. Make icing: heat cream and butter until butter is melted in a saucepan over medium heat.
12. Stir in vanilla and powdered sugar, remove from heat, and beat with a mixer until thick and smooth.
13. Frost cookies as desired.

Notes（コツ・ポイント・注意点）

★Pumpkin pie spice: I know you can easily buy this in the US, but here in Japan we don't have the premade stuff so I make my own according to illmakeitmyself.net's instructions. Combine the following spices together, mix well, and store in an empty spice shaker or small jar (yields about 2Tbsp):
1 Tbsp cinnamon
2 tsp ginger powder
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp cloves

★Chilling times: I had to use "baking margarine," which is softer than real butter and I suspect it caused a lot of my sticking issues despite a full 24 hours of dough chilling time. However, keeping the dough in the freezer until it firmed up a bit more, and then keeping the extra dough in there until I was ready to work with it helped a lot.

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Homemade pumpkin pie spice recipe from http://illmakeitmyself.net/2012/10/22/pumpkin-spice-latte-with-kabocha-puree-bonus-pumpkin-pie-spice-recipe/