Soft Oat Flour Pumpkin Cookies

I got the inspiration to make these pumpkin cookies after receiving some delicious maple products from Coombs Family Farms, a thorough review and giveaway coming soon which you don’t want to miss because this stuff is AWESOME!  I always get excited for the next season after enjoying the current season for a month or so.  And my way of doing that, of course, is through food!  Speaking of…I’m already kinda craving Thanksgiving dinner.  But that’s a couple of seasons away so I’ll focus here.  I’ve been craving nutty pumpkin bread, so that’s what I tried to do here with these cookies, and succeeded!  Actually, I should really try making this into a bread since you never see bread with 100% oat flour.  If you’re looking for gluten-free oats in Omaha, they are in the gluten-free section at Whole Foods, not with the rest of the oat or flours. You can grind the oats yourself in a food processor or blender (which doesn’t work as well) or buy some online. 

With these cookies, the pumpkin flavor stands out and the maple flavor takes a backseat.  The walnuts give it a great crunch and the chocolate chips always taste great unless you are my husband who once again got upset with me for putting chocolate into something that shouldn’t have chocolate.  I think of pumpkin more as a vegetable and my husband thinks of it as a fruit and we’re both right I think!  Anyway, I had a sneaking suspicion he wouldn’t be too happy and I was right.  He went down the fruit lane and he believes fruit and chocolate should not be combined.  Whatever, I was hoping he’d take the veggie lane.  Having said that, these would be delicious without chocolate chips, there is plenty of flavor to carry the cookie without adding chocolate.  To top these tasty little treats I just sprinkled on some organic powdered sugar, but after the fact, some great cream cheese frosting would have been perfect!

Ingredients:

• 2 1/4 cups oat flour (or you can replace that 1/4 cup with spelt flour for some gluten)
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/3-1/2 cup chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup maple sugar (I used Coombs Family Farms)
• 1/4 cup butter, softened
• 1/4 cup coconut milk
• 1/2 cup maple syrup (I used Coombs Family Farms Grade B) 
• 2/3 cup canned pumpkin
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla (or you could use maple for a stronger maple flavor)
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp clove

Method:

• Pre-heat oven to 350
• Cream butter with maple sugar and maple syrup, add coconut milk, egg, pumpkin and vanilla and mix well
• In a separate bowl, mix all remaining dry ingredients except for the chocolate chips and walnuts, slowly add to the wet mixture and mix well
• Add chocolate chips and walnuts, mix well
• By teaspoonful, drop batter onto cookie sheet, you can do this fairly close since the cookies don’t really spread, they puff up.  For this, I use a small OXO cookie scoop from BBB.  These are awesome if you make cookies as often as I do!
• Bake roughly 9 minutes for the small cookie, slightly larger cookies will take around 11 minutes 

Also, today is the day I’m announcing the Yo Baby Meals giveaway winner!  Congratulations Jen O, you win!  Random.org picked # 6 and that’s you:)

Tagged as: coconut milk, maple, oat flour