Pumpkin Pecan Crunch Boulders

I’ve always found pumpkin cookies too cakey. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy them, but it seems deceptive to call them a cookie. They’re muffin tops, or tea cakes, but they are not a cookie.

These are cookies. A quick squeeze in some paper towels reduces the moisture in the pumpkin purée enough to keep the “puff-factor,” down, and keeps our cookies crisp on the outside and fudgy on the inside. Pumpkin serves as a great substitute for eggs in this recipe, which leaves us with the tenderest cookies you’ve ever eaten.

This does make them a little more fragile when they come out of the oven, but they’ll firm up as they cool.

Ingredients

• 8oz Unsalted Butter (softened)
• 6oz Dark Brown Sugar
• 4oz Granulated White Sugar
• 5oz Pumpkin Purée (do not use pie filling, just plain pumpkin purée)
• 10.5oz All-Purpose Flour
• 4 tsp Pumpkin Spice
• 1.5 tsp Baking Powder
• 1 tsp Baking Soda
• 2 tsp Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt or 1 tsp Table Salt
• 4 oz Spiced/Candied Pecans (store-bought or homemade, chopped into ~1/4" pieces)
• 4 oz Streusel Crunch
• 4 oz White Chocolate Chips

Directions

Prep the Pumpkin

1. Place two-to-three layers of clean paper towel on a plate, then spoon the Pumpkin Puree onto the paper towels. Fold the towels over the pumpkin and press to squeeze the water from the pumpkin. The pumpkin should peel off of the paper towel pretty easily. Once you've squeezed the water from your pumpkin, the resulting pulp should weigh 3.2 oz. If it weighs less than 3.2 oz, add enough water to reach that number. If it weighs more, keep blotting with paper towels until it reaches 3.2 oz.

Make the Cookies

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF and line one or two aluminum baking sheets with parchment paper. If planning to bake two pans at once, move oven racks to lower-middle and upper-middle positions. If baking only a single pan at once, move one oven rack to the middle position.
2. In a large bowl beat the softened butter, brown sugar, and white sugar until combined. You do not need to cream them until light and fluffy, just ensure they're well combined.
3. Beat in your pressed pumpkin puree until combined.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk together the Flour, Pumpkin Spice, Baking Powder, Baking Soda, and Salt. Add this to the wet ingredients and mix until well combined. Over-mixing is not a huge concern here, and the additional gluten developed from mixing more than your average cookie recipe can actually replace the proteins you would normally get from an egg in a cookie recipe. Since we've replaced the egg with the pumpkin, this dough will be much more tender when baked and a little extra gluten won't make the cookie unpleasantly tough.
5. Once the dry ingredients are incorporated fold in the Spiced Pecans, Streusel Crunch, and White Chocolate Chips.
6. Portion into either 3 oz or 1.5 oz mounds of dough on a parchment-lined aluminum baking sheet, with at least three-inches between each cookie. I typically don't try to fit more than six per pan. You can roll them into perfect balls if you want more uniform cookies or leave them rough on the top for more crunchy golden bits in the finished cookies.
7. Bake at 350ºF for 16-22 minutes for the 3 oz cookies, and 9-12 minutes for the 1.5 oz cookies. The cookies can be removed from oven as soon as they've spread and the edges appear dry and the middles are still puffed and steamy. If you want a sturdier cookies with a bit more crunch on the outside leave the cookies in the oven until the edges and have turned golden — this can be tough to see against the already-orange dough, so check carefully — and the top of the cookie has lost its shine and spots have started to brown.
8. Once removed from the oven do not try to move the cookies from the baking sheet until cooled. These are flimsy until they've had the chance to cool. Give them 20 minutes to cool on the pan, then remove them to a cooling rack. If you went with a shorter bake-time, you still need to be careful moving these. They'll firm up as they cool completely on the rack, but if you suspect the bottom of the cookie is underdone you can always throw them back into the oven for 2-3 minutes. The amount of moisture in this recipe is less predictable than most because of the pumpkin, and extra time in the oven is the most effective way to compensate.