Martha Monday–Pumpkin Cookies w/ Brown Butter Icing

It’s week two of Martha Monday and I hope you enjoyed last weeks Gingersnap Palmiers.  This week’s cookie was chosen by my awesome friend, Catherine.  Who is also Rob’s sister!  She surprised the girls with a visit from Aunt CC and it’s been go, go, go all weekend. I asked our illustrious guest to choose this week’s cookie and, of course, be a taste tester as well.

After going through the book a few times, she choose the Pumpkin Cookies with Brown Butter Icing on page 197 in the Cakey and Tender section.  As I had just made some chocolate cupcakes for our street party, I had some pumpkin in the fridge, so it was easy to agree and take on this cookie.  I actually had everything required in the recipe in the pantry, yay me!

I was a bit taken off at first because the full recipe yields 6 dozen cookies.  Even if they were the best cookies ever we’d never eat them all and only so many friends would be willing to take them after I pawned off the cupcakes.  So I split the recipe.  This is sometimes tricky, but alas it worked out quite fine.  I got almost 3 dozen.

I’d also never had brown butter icing before and when I first read it I thought it was brown sugar, but nope it’s browned butter.  It was delish.  The brown specks are the browned butter bits.

Easy/Hard:  This is a super easy recipe.  You also don’t have to chill or cut out.  You do, however, require a pastry bag to pipe them.  In a pinch you could pipe them by putting the batter into a large Ziploc bag and cutting the corner.  The hardest part was making sure when you piped the cookies, they were all roughly the same size.  I was close, but by no means perfect.

Ingredient availability: There is nothing in this recipe that you can’t get at the local grocery store.

What I like about this cookie:  I loved the texture.  I’m partial to the more substantial cookie and with this cakey consistency the cookie held up really well. Unless you want to make them bigger, the suggested 1 1/2 inch circles are a perfect size.

Baking experience: Because I had to half the recipe, I wrote down the newer recipe on a piece of paper and wasn’t paying attention and put 3/4 cup evaporated milk and left out the pumpkin.  When in actual fact I needed half of 3/4 cups of milk and 3/4 cup of pumpkin.  Oops, so to make it not too runny, I cut the pumpkin to 1/2 cup.  So that’s really more of a “read the recipe correctly” issue as oppose to a baking issue.  I also halved the icing recipe.  If you want a decent amount of icing on the full cookie, make a full batch as it will keep in the fridge for a while.  The 1 tsp recommendation in the recipe barely covers the cookie in a thin coating so I was more generous with the amounts and then I ran out and didn’t have enough for all my cookies. It’s ok, they are fabulous naked!  When making the icing, be careful not to burn the butter, once it starts to brown, it does so really fast.  Remove from heat and continue to stir until you get a lovely golden brown colour with lots of dark brown specks.

Taste: I’ve never had brown butter icing before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  OMG I may put it on anything.  It has a caramel/nutty flavour that makes you want to go back for more.  The cookie itself was light and flavourful and although I left out 1/4 cup pumpkin, the pumpkin flavour came through.  I would definitely  make these again.  The only issue I have is you can’t stack the cookies to store them because the icing is soft. So unless you are having a big party or giving them away, make the half batch.

If you think you’d like the recipe, you can find it here on Martha’s website as well as the book!

So that’s this week’s Martha Monday, I hope you enjoyed!

Thanks for looking!

Linking with:
Joy of Desserts
Mingle Monday
Melt in Your Mouth Monday
Mangia Mondays
Made by You Monday
Tea Party Tuesday
Get Your Craft On
Handmade Tuesdays
Hearth & Soul Hop