Pumpkin Gingerbread Cookies

Halloween and dessert go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or maybe that’s only true on my blog (I have quite a few Halloween desserts on here). Who cares? More yummy desserts for us to enjoy, like these Pumpkin Gingerbread Cookies!

Although most people don’t usually equate Halloween with cookies, I saw Halloween-themed cookie cutters in the supermarket and made an impulse buy. Whoopsie. So these cookies are to justify my purchase. Plus, it gives me another excuse to add pumpkin into a recipe! I adapted this recipe form a traditional gingerbread cookie recipe from Cooking Light.

I was recently sent Truvia’s new Brown Sugar Blend, a mixture of Truvia and Brown Sugar that offers a brown sugar-like taste, texture and volume, with 75% fewer calories than regular brown sugar. One half cup of Truvia Brown Sugar Blend (210 calories) provides the same sweetness as one cup of brown sugar (830 calories).

Truvia is also having a great contest right now: the Truvia Baking Star contest. Bakers can submit two-minute videos that feature their own original Truvia Brown Sugar Blend recipe on www.TruviaBakingStar.com, to win a trip to New York and an all-expense paid professionally-filmed baking video that will be promoted by the brand. Three finalists will be brought to NYC for a bake-off, where they’ll meet Truvia brand reps, reporters and editors of top media publications.

Here are the details:

• From September 16 – October 14, 2014, fans can submit their videos via www.TruviaBakingStar.com.
• From October 21 – October 30, 2014, fans can vote for their favorite of 10 semi-finalists.
• Shortly after October 30, 2014, the three finalists with the most votes will be notified that they have won an all-expense-paid trip to New York City with a guest.
• On November 19, 2014, the three finalists’ baking skills will be judged live by the YouTube Star judges and the Truvia^® Baking Star Contest winner will be announced.

Three finalists will win an all-expense-paid trip to New York City, where they will compete in a live bake-off event on November 19, judged by YouTube stars April Moore, Byron Talbott, Joanne Ozug and Gaby Dalkin. The winner will be awarded the title of Truvia® Baking Star. He or she will win a professionally produced and promoted video, and his or her recipe will be featured on Truvia.com.

So, on to my recipe!

Ingredients:

•  2 1/3 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/4 cup Truvia brown sugar blend, firmly packed
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1/2 cup pumpkin
• 1 egg
• 3 tablespoons molasses

Add the dry ingredients to a bowl, mixing to combine (flour, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, nutmeg, salt, baking soda).

Add the butter and sugar to a large bowl. Beat with an electric mixer until smooth, about 5 minutes.

Add the pumpkin, egg, and molasses and beat until combined.

Add the flour mixture to the pumpkin mixture and beat until fully combined — it will be a pretty sticky dough.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. When ready to bake, preheat your oven to 350 degrees F and remove the dough from the refrigerator.

Add the dough to a well floured surface and roll out to about 1/8 – 1/4 inch thickness. Cut with your cookie cutters of choice (I used cat, ghost, and pumpkin cookie cutters) and add to a baking sheet coated with cooking spray or with a silicone mat. Roll up the scraps leftover and roll out again. Cut more cookies from the dough and repeat this process until you are out of dough.

Bake for about 8-10 minutes or until the cookies are lightly browned.  Let completely cool.

You can decorate the cookies with icing if you’d like. I just lined the cookies with icing so you could see what the shape was.

This will make a varying number of cookies depending on how big your cookie cutters are. I ended up with about 16 cookies with my cookie cutters.

The Truvia blend works out great! The sweetness was on par with using traditional brown sugar, not too sweet but not lacking in sweetness either. If you make this recipe using normal brown sugar, be sure to use 1/2 cup instead of 1/4 cup.

The pumpkin in the cookies keeps them softer than your traditional gingerbread cookies which I really liked. I added more baking soda so that they’d puff up a bit because I like when my cookies look like that 🙂