Gluten Free Pumpkin Cookies

what's in it

Recipe ingredients

• Pumpkin puree – Be sure to use plain canned pumpkin puree here, and measure out 5 ounces on a kitchen scale. A small can of pumpkin is usually 15 ounces, so you're using a third of the can. Refrigerate the rest in a sealed container for up to a week.
• Granulated sugar – Adds sweetness and tenderness to these cookies.
• Light brown sugar – Adds sweetness, depth of flavor from the added molasses.
• Molasses – A single tablespoon of unsulphured molasses deepens the flavor without having to add extra brown sugar. It also adds some color to the cookies.
• Melted butter – Adds moisture and flavor. Using melted butter makes the cookies a bit chewy to balance the extra softness that pumpkin puree adds.
• Egg – Adds some lift and structure without too much extra puffiness.
• Gluten free flour blend – Any high-quality all purpose gluten free flour blend that has superfinely ground rice flour as a base should work here. I like Better Batter's original blend, Nicole's Best multipurpose flour with added xanthan gum, and Bob's Red Mill 1-to-1 (in the blue bag) to with additional 1/8 teaspoon xanthan gum.
• Salt – Enhances the other flavors and balances the sweetness.
• Baking soda – Reacts with the acidity in the molasses to add some rise, and helps the cookies brown.
• Pumpkin pie spice – A mix of all the best warm ground spices (cinnamon, ginger, allspice, cloves, and nutmeg) that adds more pumpkin flavor than the actual pureed pumpkin itself.

My Pro Tip

Expert tips

Use only canned pumpkin puree

These cookies are made with plain canned pumpkin puree, which has plenty of moisture and only a delicate pumpkin flavor. This simplifies the recipe, and the liquid in the puree makes for naturally cakey, pillowy cookies.

Some of our richer pumpkin recipes are instead made with pumpkin butter, which is cooked down with spices, apple cider, and maple syrup until it's lost a lot of its moisture and has lots of depth of flavor all on its own. This recipe is simpler and easier.

Chill the cookie dough for easier handling

The cookie dough begins so soft that it almost feels like it would be made into a cake. It will thicken a bit as it stands and the liquids hydrate the flour, but it will remain quite sticky to work with, but chilling the dough for about 10 minutes helps make the dough much easier to handle. Don't chill for too long, though, or they won't spread in the oven at all.

Use two wet small spoons for uniform sizing

I often like to portion gluten free cookies with a spring-loaded ice cream scoop, often a #50 scoop (that just means that it would take 50 of that size scoop to make a quart of ice cream). You can make these portions that way, of course, but this dough is so sticky that I find it's easier to use 2 teaspoons to scoop and then scrape off this cookie dough.

Handle the cookie dough with wet hands

The dough is too sticky to handle with dry hands. So roll it into rounds and press into flat 1/2-inch thick disks with wet fingers and hands.

Make perfect rounds with a wet cookie cutter

To ensure that your baked cookies are truly round, not oval, moisten a 2½-inch or 3-inch metal cookie cutter and use it to coax the raw dough into a rounder shape.

Be careful about oven temp

The molasses in these cookies makes the cookies more vulnerable to burning. Most ovens run hot, so be sure to check your oven temperature with a simple analog standalone thermometer, and let that guide you to a proper 325°F. The bottoms will burn at 350°F.

Cool before icing or serving

The freshly-baked cookies are fragile. Let them sit undisturbed for 10 minutes, then lift with a thin spatula onto a wire rack so they cool completely. And let them cool entirely before trying to dip them in the icing or the tops of the cookies will come off in the icing, and the icing will melt right off.

substitutions

Ingredient substitutions

Dairy free

The only dairy in these cookies is from the melted butter. To make them dairy-free, you can try using vegan butter. Melt and Miyoko's Kitchen are my favorite brands. I would not try using shortening, as it has no moisture and your cookies will be way too puffy and almost dry.

Vegan

To make vegan cookies, you'll need to replace the dairy as described above, use a “chia egg” to replace the one egg (1 tablespoon ground white chia seeds + 1 tablespoon lukewarm water, mixed and allowed to gel), and use vegan versions of all the sugars since many are made with bone char.

make ahead/leftovers

Storage instructions

These cookies are so moist and tender that they stay fresh-tasting for quite a while. I don't like to stack them when they're at room temperature, since they do tend to stick to one another.

Freezing

You can, and should, freeze these cookies if you'd like to store them touching one another and don't want them to stick. Just lay them out in a single layer, with or without the icing, on a rimmed baking sheet that is small enough to fit in your freezer. Freeze the cookies until firm, then pile them into a freezer-safe container and enjoy them either right from the freezer or at room temperature.