I have a pumpkin spice oatmeal recipe (2 ways) with a bonus pumpkin pie pudding recipe in the works, but it has been taking me far too long to post. A wonderful vacation to MN got in the way. I wanted to give my readers a little something, though. So here are my (not) award winning pumpkin spice cookies. I pulled out every trick I knew in the book, but alas I did not win the first cooking competition I ever entered with these beauties. Well, I didn’t use every trick, they were not the absolute tastiest cookies I could have made, as I wanted to make a healthier recipe. So how can cookies be healthy? Well they are a bit of an homage to this recipe:

http://www.landolakes.com/recipe/1557/chewy-molasses-sandwich-cookies

And I think ditching the frosting by incorporating the orange flavor into the cookie, reducing the salt (for the amount of flour called for), and using ~30% whole wheat flour counts as healthifying. Yes, I made that word up. 🙂 So here you go, not award winning, but pretty tasty if I do say so myself

Pumpkin Spice & Orange Zest Cookies

• 2 cups brown sugar (packed)
• 1.5 cups butter (softened)
• 1 cup honey
• 1 egg
• 1 T molasses
• 1 T orange zest
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 4 cups all purpose flour
• 1.5 cups whole wheat pastry flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1.55 tsp pumpkin pie spice
• 1 tsp ground ginger

Preheat oven to 350F.

Cream butter and sugar with electric mixer until well blended and fluffy. Mix in honey, egg, molasses, orange zest, and vanilla.

In a separate bowl combine the rest of the ingredients and stir until well blended.

Using the electric mixer, mix the flour mixture into the butter sugar mixture in stages, adding about 1/3 of the flour mixture at a time.

Shape dough into balls, and roll in sugar. A mixture of yellow, red, and orange sugar adds a festive touch.

Place 1 inch apart on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet.

Bake in the oven at 350F for 10 minutes until cookies begin to puff up and tops just start to crackle.