A couple of weeks ago I was invited to a food blogger potluck hosted by CC of Pink Candles at Ridgemont High. I wanted to make a little dessert to go along with some pesto pasta salad that I made and I decided I wanted to make sandwich cookies – with pumpkin filling!

Except… well. The cookies didn’t come out as planned.

And neither did the pumpkin filling.

But, not wanting to waste my efforts and deciding that the cookies still actually tasted okay, I just went with it. And called them cookies with pumpkin dip. I let people assemble the cookies themselves since my pumpkin filling was way too loose to stay together in the cookie (hence, I called it “dip” instead).

The cookies have similar spices to pumpkin pie – so you could easily use pumpkin pie spice instead or adjust to your liking. The recipe is from a cookbook I got in a reddit gift exchange called One Girl Cookies. It originally calls for twice as much ginger with just a little cinnamon, but I love cinnamon, so I switched up the flavors a little bit.

The first thing that went wrong is that I rolled out the dough too thick. I haven’t rolled out cookies in forever, and for some reason I couldn’t remember what an 1/8th of an inch looks like. The cookies ended up puffing up and getting way too thick for cookie sandwiches, and I ended up splitting them open with a knife to make them sandwich cookie worthy.

The second mistake? Too much pumpkin in my filling. I could have “fixed” it with more powdered sugar, but it already tasted super sweet to me so I didn’t want to go that route. I added about 4 or 5 spoonfuls of pumpkin which was too much, so I adjusted my recipe below to 3 tablespoons, which should be about enough (though test it after two if you want a more cookie sandwich filling rather than a dip).

All in all though, the cookies were still pretty tasty. The cookies have a gingerbread-like flavor and spice and are a bit crunchy on the outside and softer in the middle (especially if you make a boo-boo and don’t roll them out thin enough like I did!). Continue reading “winter spice cookies with pumpkin cream”