Pumpkin Snickerdoodles (Sandi Patty)

I was SO EXCITED when we booked Sandi Patty to be on our show. I've been a HUGE fan of hers since I was little. I loved singing her songs (in the privacy of my room) but now that she's written a cookbook, we actually have something in common!! Lynne and I made two of her recipes to use in a live on-air taste test, and this is one of them. They got rave reviews among the work crowd...in fact, one of them even requested this for her birthday treat!

It's a perfect fall comfort food - a good twist on other pumpkin recipes. Soft and bready, it goes great with a hot cup of coffee. We have a few weeks of fall left...so put this one on your "to-make" list.

PS - enjoy the fancy pants pictures. These are the ones we took for the station Facebook page and they're way better than my usual pics!

The Recipe
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
3-4 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup canned pumpkin
1 egg
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons white sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, pumpkin pie spice, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside. Cream butter and brown and white sugar in a large bowl. Beat pumpkin, egg, and vanilla into creamed butter and sugar, and mix until creamy. With a wooden spoon, mix the dry ingredients into the wet just until blended.

Refrigerate dough for at least 30 minutes (not necessary, but the chilled dough will make rolling the cookies much easier). Mix cinnamon and sugar in a small bowl. Roll tablespoons of dough in the cinnamon sugar mixture and place on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake 15-20 minutes. Cool on wire racks.
You might want to have a little extra cinnamon and sugar on hand from what the recipe called for - and if you REALLY like the pumpkin spice taste...make sure you have a good amount of that on hand too.

Mix together the dry ingredients (minus the cinnamon and sugars) with a whisk.
Put the softened butter (melt it if you didn't get it out in time to soften it), brown sugar, and white sugar in a mixing bowl.

Mix until it's well blended.

Add the pumpkin, vanilla, and egg. If you have a big can of pumpkin, you can freeze the rest to use later.

Mix that up - the batter will be pretty wet.

Then add the dry ingredients. You'll need to refrigerate the dough for at least a half hour to make it manageable to work with. (I chilled mine even longer than that, and still, the dough was very wet.

I found that the amounts of cinnamon and sugar listed weren't enough to cover the whole amount of cookies. I think I redid it three or four times. It depends on how much coating you like on your cookies. (Doris from work made this recipe too and she added pumpkin pie spice to this as well. She said it gave it extra pumpkin flavor.)

This dough will be very wet and sticky to work with. Once you get it rolled in the cinnamon/sugar, it's much easier to handle.

Make sure you grease the pans so your cookies don't stick!

Warm, soft cookies....YUM.

Totally worth the mess. These are SO GOOD.