Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

I have a confession to make.

My name is Erika, and I have an unhealthy addiction to Pinterest. It doesn't help that my biggest board is currently the one for cookies, cakes, and other delicious goodies. Ooh, I'm gonna get so fat. Further contributing to my fattening is the fact that the only sweets Michael will eat are from Little Debbies, not homemade. Lately I've been pinning a lot of pumpkin recipes, and this recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies looked like it was right up my alley. Plus, I actually had all the ingredients for it.

Ingredients

• 1 cup canned pumpkin
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp milk
• 1 TB vanilla
• 1 11oz bag chocolate chips

1. Combine pumpkin, sugar, vegetable oil, and egg in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, ground cinnamon, and salt. Dissolve the baking soda with the milk and stir into the wet ingredients. Add flour mixture to pumpkin mixture and mix well. Stir for about one minute.
2. Add vanilla and chocolate chips and stir until combined.
3. Line baking sheet with parchment paper. Drop cookies on by the spoonful. Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes.

The cookies came out delicious, with a soft, cakelike texture - definitely not your standard chewy cookie. One thing of note - the recipe called for an 11oz bag of chocolate chips, and the bag I had (I think it was Nestle Semi Sweet) was a 12oz bag. I love chocolate, so I went ahead and used the whole bag, but in retrospect, I would have used less chocolate or more pumpkin. They were still really good, but I felt like the chocolate kind of overpowered the pumpkin flavor. Mikayla refuses to try the cookies, but Michael did try one and he said they were OK (and from someone who doesn't eat my baking, that is a compliment). One of the guys from next door tried one, and he seemed to enjoy it, but he doesn't know much English so I'm not really sure.

As you can see from the above picture, I find that the best technique (for me, at least) for baking in my OBK is to take all the ingredients out, and then put them up as I use them. I also only have one set of dry measuring cups, one wet, and two sets of measuring spoons (but only because someone broke my tablespoon, and that was a problem). I just rinse them off with hot water if I need to reuse them for another ingredient. By doing it this way, I save myself a lot of spinning in circles finding everything, and there is also minimal mess to clean up once the cookies are in the oven.

What is your strategy for baking? Do you pull out everything at once, or one thing at a time?

<3,
Erika