Name: Vegan Pumpkin Cookies
Prep time: 30 min
Yield: 19 pieces
Cuisine: Macrobiotic
Ingredients: 10.5 oz pumpkin (weighed cleaned); 2 cups type 1 flour (of ancient grains); 3.5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil; 2 tbsp muscovado sugar; 2 tbsp raisins; 6 walnuts; zest of 1 lemon

For the Light and Tasty column today we are cooking vegan. My proposal is these vegan pumpkin cookies without yeast, a very simple recipe made with a few healthy ingredients.

Today’s appointment excited me because I love vegan recipes. From the start, I opted for a dessert because I’m a fan of vegan desserts, and I even had several “potential” recipes, and… ahhh how I wished I could bake them all!
But the past week has been tiring for me, with house-work-grandma-kids commitments + two painful ribs… but let’s not dwell on that.. 🤣 Better to think about the new week starting today, which I hope will be free of ailments, so I can bake all those wandering recipes I would love to tell you about in non-biblical times!
For now, I’ll start here: with these vegan pumpkin cookies which… my husband was thrilled about! (and with that, I’ve said it all! 🤭).

I had already begun exploring the vegan world years ago by attending the vegetarian and vegan cooking course, do you remember? Thanks to this course, I learned to use some ingredients that I previously only knew by hearsay (like agave syrup and agar agar), and since then, I’ve become increasingly passionate about vegan desserts. Desserts that, really, have nothing to envy in traditional sweets.

Here on the blog, I have already offered some vegan sweets, but now with these pumpkin cookies, I wanted to try a different path, that of natural sweets, for which a light bulb lit up reading the book Dolci buoni e sani by Dealma Franceschetti, ed. Macro.

I have followed her macrobiotic-vegan blog for years, even though I am neither macrobiotic nor vegan, but to me, her recipes are all excellent, and then, you know, I really enjoy cooking and eating alternative dishes of all kinds. Although I admit I haven’t overcome the hurdle of trying certain ingredients I’m not familiar with, like rice malt or amasake, and I haven’t delved into the founding concepts of macrobiotics: Yin and Yang foods, energies, weakening and tonifying effects… I’m not ready for all that yet.

However, some concepts intrigue me. One of all, the fact that natural sweets have a sweetness that doesn’t “burst” (quote) but expresses itself little by little, savoring, and educating the palate. And in this concept, I found a fantastic analogy with what I have always said about salt – regarding the salty taste that covers the flavors, the perception of true flavors, the re-education of the palate, and the gradual approach to low-sodium foods – in short, a perfect affinity, applied to sweets and the perception of sweetness, which could not fail to strike me, and interest me.

And so today for our Monday column I decided to rely on this book and propose a recipe not only vegan but also vegan-macrobiotic. For my pumpkin cookies, I chose to take inspiration from a recipe that could be suitable for our morning breakfast and that I could customize according to the availability of my pantry. And since I had just bought a pumpkin, and still had some of my homemade raisins to use, when I saw the title ‘pumpkin and raisin cookies’ I said: “there it is, it’s her!”. 😁

The aesthetic result of these vegan pumpkin cookies is different from what the recipe promised, in the sense that using cookie cutters with my mixture was impossible!, but that’s okay, when you customize recipes you know you can take some risks. I will detail my variations, however minimal, in the procedure.

Are you ready? Go!

👇 If you are looking for more vegan ideas, here are 3 more of my desserts:

Difficulty: Very easy
Cost: Economical
Preparation time: 30 Minutes
Portions: 19 pieces
Cooking methods: Oven, Microwave
Cuisine: Macrobiotic
Seasonality: Autumn, Winter

Ingredients

10.5 oz pumpkin (weighed cleaned)
2 cups type 1 flour (of ancient grains)
3.5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp muscovado sugar
2 tbsp raisins
6 walnuts
zest of 1 lemon

Tools

Microwave Oven
Oven
Bowls

Preparation

First, peel the pumpkin and cook it.
When I need to use pumpkin as an ingredient, I usually cook it in the microwave. For more info, here’s my tutorial –> here
Cooking time in the microwave for 300 g of pumpkin: 5 minutes at maximum power.
Let the pumpkin cool slightly, then mash it into a puree with a fork.
Flavor it with the grated zest of one lemon.
Pour the flour into a bowl.
The recipe called for some rice flour, which I unfortunately didn’t have at home, so I used all type 1 flour, an ancient grain flour Gentil Rosso and San Pastore. A good opportunity to try it in this recipe since ancient grain flours are considered an excellent choice in macrobiotic cooking.
Add the oil to the flour. To distribute the oil in the flour, rub it with your hands, like crumbling.
I usually use seed oil in desserts, this is the first time I tried extra virgin olive oil and I must say I was satisfied.
Add the whole cane sugar (muscovado) and the raisins.
Having used my homemade raisins, soaking wasn’t necessary, but when using packaged raisins, a short soak might be useful.
Add the pumpkin puree.
Mix with a spoon. You get a soft mixture, softness certainly due to the pumpkin puree which in my case was quite moist.
Cooking the pumpkin in the microwave I believe contributed to making my pumpkin moister than expected. Therefore, I suggest adding little pumpkin at a time to the flour, so as to adjust the consistency of the mixture as you go (or add more flour).
That’s why I couldn’t roll out the dough and use a cookie cutter, because it turned out too soft, so I decided to make spooned ugly-but-good cookies.
But those who know my recipes know that this is a type of cookie that I always end up making. 🙂
I was about to bake when at the last moment I decided to add some walnuts.
I inserted a piece of walnut in each cookie, covering it with dough so it stayed inside. And also to prevent it from burning during cooking.
Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
The result is 19 surprisingly good cookies when hot, eaten just out of the oven, soft inside and crunchy outside.
And equally surprisingly good eaten after 15-30 minutes, i.e., warm.
The next day, as always happens with this type of cookie, they lose their external crunchiness and become chewier, but I assure you they are just as irresistible. And this is also thanks to the crunchy note given by the walnuts.
But they are irresistible especially because this is the characteristic of natural desserts, of less sweet desserts: satisfying the desire for sweets with simplicity and in an increasing taste perceivable little by little, one cookie after another.
And in the end, we finished them all. I’ll have another one. Do you want one too? Yes, please. Who wants one? Ah okay, I’ll eat it. And you? Here, one for you and one for me… 🤭