The other day I was looking in my cupboard. Both a can of pumpkin purée and multiple bags of chocolate chips were sitting on the shelves. For the past week or so the thought of making cookies had been on my mind – it is cookie making season, after all! And I had the thought “why not pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.”

Of course, I am not the only one to have thought of this wonderful combination. There are many recipes for this cookie, and all seem to be slightly different. A number use vegetable oil instead of butter (which is a breach of the cookie commandments if you ask me), and some use baking powder while others don’t.

For experiments sake, I decided to make two batches. My base recipe for all chocolate chip cookies is, of course, the Toll House recipe I learned to make cookies from when I was a young girl. I found two different recipes that sounded like they would work out pretty well.

The first recipe uses baking powder and only one egg. Instead of all the different spices, I just used All-Spice, and I forgot the cinnamon. The result? A cookie that has a cake-like consistency. It tasted pretty good. But, this was not quite the cookie I was looking for.

Cookie mountain!

The second recipe doesn’t use eggs and melts the butter before it’s whipped with the sugars. The creator of the recipe says she has tried many times to bake a pumpkin chocolate chip that honors the traditional consistency and chewiness of chocolate chip cookies. This was my ultimate goal as well. I remembered to add the cinnamon and it made so much of a difference, as soon I as I mixed all of the ingredients it smelled like pumpkin pie. As you can see, I put a little more effort into shaping the cookies this time around.

Cookie mountain number 2!

Verdict: I definitely like the second batch of cookies I made better because they were closer to regular chocolate chip cookies. However, the next time I make these, I think I’ll try omitting the baking powder altogether.