Pumpkin Coffee Cake Cookies Might Be the Best Fall Cookies

Pumpkin coffee cake cookies. I don't even know where to start with these cookies. If you like streusel, if you like cozy fall flavors, you are going to love these cookies. I do, and I'm not even a big pumpkin person. They're my favorite cookie this season so far. So let's get started. How do you make them? First, pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit because there's no chilling for this recipe. We're gonna roll right into it. Next, a large mixing bowl. To this, we are going to add 1 1⁄2 cup of softened unsalted butter. Word about these cookies, these are a gourmet-style cookie, which means they're pretty big. Because they're pretty large, we're only going to be making 11. Sometimes you can get 12, but usually 11 cookies out of this recipe, 11 big cookies. Yes, this recipe doubles just fine. You can absolutely double it, but you end up using very high quantities of each ingredient. So that's just something to keep in mind. So we're going to cream this butter with some sugar. You'll need 1 1⁄2 cup of firmly packed, light brown sugar. Nicely packed in there. As well as 1⁄3 cup of granulated sugar. And I'm also going to add my spices here. This is two teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice. If you don't have pumpkin spice on hand, I will try to remember to link to my recipe on how to make your own pumpkin pie spice blend. It's very easy. Today's recipe could absolutely be made with your stand mixer with a paddle attachment, no problem. But today I'm going to be using my electric hand mixer. And we're going to cream everything together until it's light and fluffy and nicely combined. Butter's a smidge cold, so it's just taking a minute. So here's what we're aiming for. Nice and creamy and well combined. See, nothing crumbly, no butter streaks. Next we'll add our pumpkin puree. You just need 1⁄3 cup of pumpkin puree for this recipe. Normally when we're adding pumpkin, we spend a lot of time working to get all the moisture out of it because pumpkin is mostly water. And when you put water in a cookie, it becomes cakey and fluffy. And most people don't want their cookies to be like that, myself included. This is a coffee cake cookie. So it's meant to have that nice, light, melt-in-your-mouth texture. So we don't need to worry about taking any of the water out of the pumpkin, just add it as is. Next we need one large egg, but we're only going to be using the yolk from it. I know I mentioned we don't need to worry about taking out the water from the pumpkin, but we don't want to go overboard. So we are going to remove the water that would be with the egg white. I'm just adding the egg yolk. Save that egg white to make, ooh, candied pecans. Perfect time of year for that. Maybe I'll do that. Next we'll add a healthy pour of vanilla extract. You'll need one and a half teaspoons. I'll just do that three times. And we'll just beat this together until everything is nicely combined. And sometimes when you're doing this, the mixture can look a little bit piecey and separated. It actually looks pretty uniform here. There you go. Kind of see what I'm talking about here. Fine and normal, don't panic. I'm just doing a quick scrape to make sure everything is nicely combined. Always important when you're making a cookie dough. We're done with that for now. We'll need a separate mixing bowl to combine our dry ingredients. So for this recipe, we're going to start with two cups of cake flour. I will include notes in the description in case you want to use all-purpose flour. You would use a combo of all-purpose flour and cornstarch. Cake flour is my favorite, but the all-purpose substitute will work. Next, we need a little bit of baking soda. It's a half teaspoon of baking soda, a fourth teaspoon of baking powder, and just one half teaspoon of table salt. I'm a one-fourth guy here, so we'll do two of those. I'll whisk everything together, get that nicely combined. Pumpkin spice already went in with our butter just to really help bring out those flavors the best we can. We need to add it here. All right, now we will stir the dry ingredients into the wet. You can use your mixer on low speed if you prefer for this. Just going to add it in three parts. When you're adding dry ingredients to wet ingredients, adding it gradually is very helpful because it allows the wet ingredients to absorb that flour gradually. If you add everything at once, you can end up with a dry mixture that's just a pain to combine. That's why we do it in parts. And our last bit. Okay, once I have all of that flour combined, which it looks like we do, let's see what we're working with here. We are good. And you're going to notice this is a pretty soft cookie dough. Like it almost feels like a batter, totally normal. You're great, you're golden. Set this aside, and we're going to make our streusel. I'm just going to wipe out the bowl for my dry ingredients and use that. Why dirty an extra dish if we don't have to? This streusel layer is incredible. It goes inside the cookie, it goes on top of the cookie. If the streusel is your favorite part of a coffee cake, you're going to love this. First thing you want to do though is prep your butter. Six tablespoons of unsalted butter. Go ahead and melt it and set it to the side. When we're making a streusel with melted butter, I love it because it's so easy. Everything combines really nicely. There's no pastry cutter needed. However, if your butter is too hot, it can sort of start to melt the sugars and make things a little bit greasy, which can then make the streusel kind of hard to bite into after it's cooked and just more difficult to work with. So let that cool a bit, and we'll work in a separate bowl to mix our dry ingredients. So we're going to need some more flour for this streusel, of course. You can use cake flour or all-purpose flour to make this streusel. If you're using cake flour, you need one and a third cups, and that is what I'm using here. If you're using all-purpose flour, you need one cup plus two tablespoons of all-purpose flour. Either way, that comes out to 150 grams. Cake flour is just lighter, so you need more of it to get to the same amount. So 150 grams of your choice of those flours. Next, we're going to add one half cup of firmly packed light brown sugar, one third cup of granulated sugar, three fourths teaspoon of ground cinnamon, and then just one fourth teaspoon of table salt. Go ahead and stir everything together before we add our butter. Let's bring in our butter. You just don't want it to feel super warm. This even has a little bit of a warm. That's okay, just nothing too hot. Drizzle that over, and do not waste butter. Those of you who have pre-ordered or are going to pre-order my cookbook have a nice little sticker in there for those of you who appreciate that we don't waste butter. Made it just for you, but seriously, I did. Okay, so when we're making a streusel, we don't want to overmix it ever. We want to be a little bit more gentle with it. We want to use a fork and just kind of claw everything together. You don't have to tilt your bowl. I'm only doing this so you can see what's going on here. We're just clawing everything together. I always pretend I'm like a tiger. Clawing at the streusel. Make sure you're turning it and tossing it. You don't want a paste. You don't want this to become pasty because then it's difficult to distribute it. So just clawing at it, turning it. Okay, this looks good. So let me clean up this mess and let's start assembling these cookies. I hope you don't mind getting your hands a little bit dirty. Not too bad, but you might get a little bit messy. So to make the cookies, you're going to scoop one and a half tablespoons of cookie dough, drop it on your cookie sheet. Then you're going to take a heaping tablespoon of the streusel and if it started to solidify again a little bit, like mine did just because, you know, it was sitting while I was cleaning up. I was cleaning up, Kasey was cleaning up. Just give it a quick little toss and it'll break up pretty nicely. You can always break it up with your hands if you need to. So we'll take a heaping tablespoon of the streusel and then I'm going to drop this into my hand because that's going to be the easiest way to add it. And then just kind of press it onto the cookie dough, like so, but we're not done yet. We're going to take another one and a half tablespoons of our cookie dough batter, drop that on top so it'll cooperate with you. Add another heaping tablespoon for the top. If the clumps are too big, break them up. These are a little bit large, so I'm breaking them up a little bit more. There you go. And we'll add another heaping tablespoon on top. Now this recipe is based on the cover photo from my new cookbook that I was talking about. And one of the only complaints or comments I get about that is people saying, this recipe makes way too much streusel. It doesn't. You don't be afraid to use the streusel. You shouldn't have any leftover when all is said and done. If you do, you just didn't put enough in your cookies and that makes me sad because that's the best part. So we're just going to repeat that process. Make sure you're spacing your cookies at least two inches apart. And if any of those streusel falls off, just pick it up and put it back on the dough. Scoop up that extra streusel, set it on top. And then these are going to bake in the center rack of your 350 degree Fahrenheit oven. In my oven, they take 13 minutes to bake, but I would recommend you check them a minute or so sooner just because all ovens run differently. What you're looking for is the edges to just barely be turning a very light golden brown. You don't want to overbake these because if you do, they'll be dry. If you ever bite into one and it seems dry, it probably just cooked a little bit too long. The bottoms should never look super dark if you flip them over. But you also, of course, don't want to underbake them or you'll be very fragile. While these cookies are warm, they're going to be pretty fragile. So we're going to let them cool. I do let them cool completely on the baking sheet. Once they're totally cool, we can remove them to a cooling rack, which is where we're going to drizzle them with vanilla glaze. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take this parchment paper, take off the crumbs, slide it under here because that's going to catch all the vanilla glaze. Makes it a little easier to clean up. But we don't need this yet. First, we have to make that vanilla glaze I was telling you about. The glaze comes together very easily. You will need 2 1⁄3 cup of powdered sugar. And if you don't feel like making a glaze, a lot of times coffee cake is just topped with powdered sugar so you could do that. I believe that's a really nice touch. Then you'll need some milk. Typically I need between one and two tablespoons. I always start by just adding one tablespoon. Did that right? Whisk it in and then add more as you need. You want the glaze to just drizzle smoothly off the whisk. And then the ribbon that falls back into the bowl should hold its shape for like a second or two before it dissolves into the bowl. That's how you know it's ready. But it's also not rocket science. You're not going to have any problem getting this the right texture. Do you want it to be smooth? I gave up sifting my powdered sugar before using in almost all instances like years ago. So I never really do it and I don't have any problem with it becoming smooth. This is perfect. Let me get the rest of the cookies which have finished baking. My favorite is when the streusel falls off the cookie and it cooks. Delicious. Very crunchy. It won't be that crunchy on the cookie. I always switch over to a spoon. Just drizzle these cookies. A nice little ribbon of glaze. It's a lot. That's fine. Have a little patience and let that glaze set before you dig in. One thing about vanilla glaze, when you consume it while it's still wet, it just makes everything taste too sweet. So just wait a couple minutes for it to set up. It doesn't take long. All right, that is how you make my favorite cookie of fall. The pumpkin coffee cake cookie. I should cut into it because it gives you a better idea of the streusel. Like you can see the streusel layers better. I'm going to cut it. So there's streusel baked into the center. The layers kind of merge together after cooking, but you are getting streusel through the whole cookie in every bite. Amazing. It tastes even better than it looks. If you have any questions or future recipe requests, please leave them in the comments. I really do always love hearing from you. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time. I'm going to break it again. I don't know if it's coming off on camera how amazing these cookies really are. I love it. I absolutely love this cookie. I think you're going to love it too. As well as one third cup of from, welcome, but I would recognize, recognize. I want to pick it back up, but that's the one I broke. If you like anything good, you're going to like these cookies. I probably shouldn't tell people I'm going to eat it. Let them cool and drizzle with a nice vanilla glizzle. Glizzle.