Yummy Fall Pumpkin Glazed Cookies

So it's no big shocker that fall, and all things fall, kinda get me all jazzed up.  Throw in temps in the 50's (like they're supposed to be) and I'm set.  It was the perfect morning yesterday to hit up the local pumpkin patch but the heavy rains the day before kept it from opening so I decided that getting our fall fix at the grocery store would have to do.

We hadn't even actually made it into the main part of the store before it looked like fall had thrown up in our cart...your normal, run-of-the-mill pumpkins for carving, fat squatty Cinderella pumpkins for our front porch fall display, apple cider.  I think you're getting the drift here.  Oh, and I can't forget the massive straw bale in the back of my vehicle for the aforementioned front porch display.  I'd found a couple recipes online that I wanted to try and of course, I needed some pumpkin puree for them.  As much as I wanted to go all nuts and whip out every pumpkin recipe I had, I decided to start with the Pumpkin Glazed Cookies and they don't disappoint.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup softened butter
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup pumpkin puree {canned pumpkin}
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 large eggs
4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (I added a little extra...can't have too much pumpkin pie spicyness!)

Glaze
3 cups powdered sugar
4 tablespoons water
1/4 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (again, 1/4tsp didn't seem like quite enough)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with wax/parchment paper.  This kinda goes against what the recipe says but I used my KitchenAid mixer to mix everything together instead of doing it by hand.  It does a better job of mixing things and is faster at it so that's a no brainer.  I combined the butter, oil, pumpkin, sugars, vanilla and eggs first. Then I added the dry remaining dry ingredients.  Go slow with the mixing because the bowl will be full and you don't want to be cleaning it off the counters and floors!  I used an ice cream scoop to scoop out the 'batter' onto the baking sheet and then flatten to 1/2 inch thick using the bottom of a glass. Bake 8 minutes.

Go ahead and mix the the glaze ingredients while the cookies are baking since this only takes a couple minutes.  Once you pull each batch of cookies out, let them cool a couple minutes on the baking sheet before moving to a cooling rack or, if you're like me and have a too small cooling rack, a long piece of foil on the counter.  Take spoon and kinda joosh and smear (yes, those are technical terms) glaze over each warm cookie.  Let the glaze harden on the cookies at least a couple hours before moving them to wherever you plan on storing them: cookie jar, container, cookie jar, etc. 

Try not to eat them all at once and enjoy!