The 13 Days of Pumpkin: #9

You guys, I've gotta be REALLY honest right now: I'm starting to get very tired of pumpkin.  It's friggin' everywhere in my kitchen.  I have eaten so much pumpkin...well.  Let's just say Yankee Best Friend knows the gory details.  The 13 Days of Pumpkin seemed like such a GREAT idea in the beginning, and now I'm just glad we're close to done.  I do it for you, folks, you better love me for it.

This haunts me in my dreams now.

Recipe #9: Pumpkin Snickerdoodles!  I've made plenty a cookie in my day, but never a snickerdoodle, so this was an adventure for me.  A very sticky and delicious adventure.  Start by preheating your oven to 400 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment paper (or foil, as I did) so they're ready to go when you are.  Whisk together 2 3/4 cups flour, 2 teaspoons cream of tartar, 1 teaspoon baking soda (I am at this point in time mad broke and couldn't justify spending $4.99 on a tub of cream of tartar for one recipe, so I substituted 1 tablespoon baking powder plus 1/4 teaspoon baking soda), 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice in a large bowl.  In a separate bowl, cream together 2 sticks unsalted butter and 1 1/2 cups sugar until light and fluffy.  Add 1 egg and stir.  Then add 3/4 cup pumpkin and stir.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix until just combined.  In a shallow bowl or pie tin, combine 1/4 sugar and 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon.  Taking heaping globs of dough (my dough was super duper ridiculously sticky--I've consulted with my resident snickerdoodle expert to find out if this is normal) and roll them around in the cinnamon-sugar blend.  Plop your tasty little goo balls on your prepared sheets, leaving plenty of space for them to expand (another confession: I'm crap with spacing.  My cookies always end up morphing together), and toss one pan at a time in the oven for about 5 minutes.  Give the baking sheet a spin and bake another 6 minutes.  Your cookies should be set at the edges but still soft and puffy in the middle.  Let them cool on the cookie sheet about 5 minutes, then use a metal spatula to transfer them to a metal rack (I used a broiler tray, it's all I have!) to continue cooling.  I got about 20 nice big cookies out of this; probably would have had more, but a lot of dough (and I do mean a LOT) stuck to my fingers, so I quite possibly licked as many cookies off my fingers as I rolled the little goobers into creation.  Enjoy the delicious!

It doesn't translate so well in crayon, but they bake up looking a little like hot cross buns.