Yes, I know. It’s another pumpkin cookie recipe. Because clearly this world doesn’t have enough. I mean, there are hardly any pumpkin recipes on my Pinterest feed right now (saaaaaaarcasm), so obviously I needed to make some. Forgive me.
Way, way back in the day (or about 4 years ago), I worked at a local bakery part time. I spent my days frosting cookies, piping buttercream swirls onto cupcakes, and making some pretty killer paninis. The place always smelled like fresh baked bread and chocolate cake, and on the best days the pepperoni bread flopped and the poor employees were forced to destroy the evidence by stuffing our faces with its cheesy, spicy goodness.
All in all, not a bad gig.
The bakery specialized in elaborate, towering specialty cakes and a variety of cupcakes, pies, cheesecakes, and muffins. But in my mind, the true star of that bakery will always be their pumpkin cookies with penuche frosting. In case you’re wondering, penuche is essentially a fancy name for the best caramely brown sugar fudge-like glaze you’ll ever consume in your life.
They were perfect. Fluffy, soft, pumpkin cakes with a brown sugar caramel frosting. They were so popular, we sold them year round. This time of year, we could barely keep them in the case. People bought them by the dozens to take to their offices or tailgating parties, or just to hoard at home.
I’ve been wanting to recreate that pumpkin cookie at home for awhile now. I tried a few different recipes last year, but just wasn’t sold on any of them. Fall slipped away, and I decided to table my experiment until this year. I started my quest this year with the standard cake-like pumpkin recipe I’ve seen on multiple blogs and recipe sites. It’s good, but it just wasn’t the same. It wasn’t as fluffy or soft as the cookie I remembered and was almost too moist. By the time I added the frosting, it was mushy and waaaaay too sweet.
So I kept hunting, looking at blogs, and checking my cookbooks, until I finally stumbled on this recipe from an old church cookbook. It has a little less sugar, a little less butter, and, most intriguingly, doesn’t use any eggs. The recipe was a breeze to whip up, and the cookies baked up just like I wanted them to–thick, fluffy, and moist, but sturdy enough to stand up to the penuche frosting. Success!
I can’t even begin to explain the wonders of this cookie. Soft, spiced pumpkin cake and brown sugar penuche frosting is a match made in autumn heaven. It’s buttery, yet light. Sweet, but not cloying. You’ll have a hard time eating just one.
These cookies hold their shape really well. As you can see, they’ll keep whatever craggly shapes you scoop them out in. I don’t worry too much about having a smooth top since it gets covered with frosting anyway, but if you want a smooth top, you can smooth it with your hands or use the bottom of a juice glass to flatten them slightly.
The penuche frosting is really just a brown sugar caramel with powdered sugar added to it to thicken it. It’s best to spread it on warm then let the glaze harden into that wonderful crackly top. If the frosting gets too thick at any point, you can microwave it a bit or whisk in a little milk to make it spreadable.
Eat these cookies in a cozy corner of your house where you’ve got a good view of the changing leaves and a big ol’ glass of milk by your side. I can’t think of a better way to spend an autumn afternoon.
Pumpkin Cookies with Penuche Frosting
Ingredients
For the cookies:
For the penuche frosting:
Instructions
For the cookies:
For the frosting:
Penuche frosting makes these cooking sound so fancy! Everything about these sounds amazing, but oh that frosting. Pretty sure I could eat the bowl of it straight.
Pretty sure I did eat it straight out of the bowl!
I love that these aren’t too sweet. Good on ya for not giving up on recreating the cookie you sold at the bakery. These look phenomenal, Courtney! Sick of pumpkin? That’s blasphemy, lol.
I know. I’m hoping people aren’t sick of it yet, because this is the first recipe I’ve made this year! I’ve still got a lot of pumpkin baking up my sleeve. 🙂
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