Yesterday I presented the shortcrust pastry recipe and today here I am with the Halloween Pumpkin and Cinnamon Cookies! Crumbly and delicious pumpkin-shaped cookies, with a rich filling of Nutella or Jam, choose according to your taste. Perfect to prepare with children or grandchildren, a sweet treat to store in old tin cookie boxes or to package for the classic “Trick or Treat”.
Over the years, I have accustomed you to an easy Halloween recipe that is economical and doesn’t take too much time to prepare. Perhaps to share with friends as well as your family. Last year, I thought of some cute puff pastry bats filled with hazelnut cream. The previous year, I offered a savory recipe for a snack, the Sausage Mummies literally conquered you. If you missed them because you have been following me for less time, don’t worry, click the blue links of the two recipes and you will be taken to the relevant blog page to read them.
This Halloween, however, I thought of the true protagonist of this celebration, the Pumpkin! With its aromas, characteristic shape, and the possibility of making it super spooky by creating eyes and a mouth, it is the true queen of the Spirit Festival! So here I am with the pumpkin and cinnamon shortcrust pastry recipe, a simple base, a shortcrust without butter and milk, perfect for lactose intolerants. You can also find the video recipe after the photo below, so you can follow the recipe step by step with me! Because as always, my recipes are easy, delicious, and economical! Since you’ve bought the pumpkin and will use little of it for this recipe, try my Vegetable Minestrone with Pumpkin! Perfect for autumn and winter, rich in vegetables!
With the leftover pumpkin, you can prepare a fantastic and delicious pistachio muffin recipe. Kids or children can take these pumpkin muffins to school for break or enjoy them as a snack after homework. Again, a simple and delicious recipe that you can use as a gift for Halloween Trick or Treat.
Grandma Sandra’s advice, after tasting the pumpkin cookies from her granddaughter: if you like cinnamon, you can also add three tablespoons of powder. That way, the aroma will be even more intense! And if Grandma says so, you can trust her! She also gave me a nice idea to try next week! But I won’t reveal it right away, we have to try it first!
Let’s move on to the pumpkin and cinnamon cookie recipe and let me know if you like them! I remind you that you can become a follower of the Facebook fan page by clicking here and the Tik Tok profile by clicking here. For all the other social networks of the blog Le Ricette di Bea, I invite you to visit the box below the pumpkin cookie recipe, where you will find all the links, both for Instagram and YouTube or Pinterest!
I almost forgot, if you are lovers of shortcrust pastry and tarts in general, you cannot miss the other shortcrust pastry recipes I have published over the years. All the blue links you find below are clickable, they will take you directly to the recipe you chose to read. Tarts are my passion and bane, I love eating them but don’t enjoy preparing them much. Yet everyone says that those few and rare times I do, they are always delicious and super yummy! Try them and let me know if you like them!!!
- Difficulty: Very Easy
- Cost: Economical
- Rest time: 30 Minutes
- Preparation time: 15 Minutes
- Portions: 12 cookies
- Cooking methods: Oven
- Cuisine: Italian
- Seasonality: Autumn, Winter
- Energy 135.67 (Kcal)
- Carbohydrates 18.85 (g) of which sugars 6.74 (g)
- Proteins 2.75 (g)
- Fat 6.03 (g) of which saturated 1.43 (g)of which unsaturated 4.31 (g)
- Fibers 0.79 (g)
- Sodium 56.87 (mg)
Indicative values for a portion of 30 g processed in an automated way starting from the nutritional information available on the CREA* and FoodData Central** databases. It is not food and / or nutritional advice.
* CREATES Food and Nutrition Research Center: https://www.crea.gov.it/alimenti-e-nutrizione https://www.alimentinutrizione.it ** U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central, 2019. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov
Ingredients for Pumpkin and Cinnamon Cookies
- 2 1/8 cups all-purpose flour
- 3/8 cup vegetable oil
- 7/16 cup brown sugar (or white sugar)
- 1 egg
- 3 1/2 oz pumpkin (boiled in salted water)
- 2 tablespoons cinnamon powder (or 3 as Grandma Sandra suggests)
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder (in my case vanilla flavored)
- 1 tsp salt (half will go into the dough and half into the cooking water)
- 3 tablespoons Nutella® (or jam of your choice)
Recipe Tools for Pumpkin and Cinnamon Cookies
- 1 Bowl
- 1 Pot
- 1 Cutting Board
- 1 Silicone Rolling Pin
- 1 Work Surface
- 1 Scale
- 1 Knife
- 1 Chopper
- 1 Spoon
- 1 Plate
- 1 Oven
- 4 Baking Sheets
- 6 Parchment Papers
- 1 Cookie Cutter
- 1 Teaspoon
- 1 Strainer
- 1 Plastic Wrap
- 1 Cooling Rack
Steps for Pumpkin and Cinnamon Cookie Recipe
Let’s start with preparing the pumpkin. Take the nice pumpkin, if you bought it whole like me, of course. Cut the top with a knife on a wooden cutting board. Then scoop out the inside with a spoon, extract the seeds that we won’t need, and then obtain the pulp. Weigh 50 grams of pumpkin. The rest you can cut into chunks and bake it or prepare sandy baked pumpkin or pumpkin muffins or a nice pumpkin soup. Oh, I almost forgot, a nice breakfast with a pumpkin and carrot bundt cake isn’t bad during this autumn period. Place a pot on the stove with plenty of water and a pinch of salt and bring to a boil. Cook the pumpkin, finely chopped, for about 10 minutes.
Drain it with a strainer and run the boiled pumpkin under cold tap water. Take a chopper and add pumpkin and vegetable oil into the bowl and chop. Set aside for now.
Now let’s prepare the pumpkin shortcrust pastry without butter. Take a bowl with high edges and pour in all-purpose flour, brown sugar or white sugar (choose which one to use), and 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder, in my case, vanilla flavored. Sprinkle with two or three tablespoons of cinnamon powder and a pinch of salt. Mix the flours with your hand or a spoon. Break the egg and add it to the bowl along with the chopped pumpkin and vegetable oil. Now work everything by kneading vigorously. Don’t overheat the shortcrust. You should get a soft and sticky dough. If you use butter, let it soften at room temperature before using it for this recipe.
Wrap the cinnamon shortcrust dough in food wrap and let it rest in the refrigerator for at least 20 – 30 minutes. After this time, you can preheat the oven to 356 degrees Fahrenheit with static mode. Now take a wooden working surface, some parchment paper, and a rolling pin. Get the Halloween pumpkin mold ready if you have it, or improvise as I did with a cookie cutter and a teaspoon. In the video recipe above, you can clearly see the step to shape our pumpkin cookies. It’s not difficult, it just requires delicacy if you don’t have the cookie mold.
Take the shortcrust dough from the fridge, place it on a sheet of parchment paper, and press it slightly with your hands. Cover it with another sheet of parchment paper, and now use the rolling pin to flatten the dough to a thickness of about 0.2 inches. Don’t worry, the recipe includes baking powder, so our cookies will rise nicely during baking.
Now create many circles with the cookie cutter. In my case, I prepared 12 cookies, so I had 24 circles. Each Halloween Pumpkin consists of two cookies, the base where I will spread the Nutella or Jam and then the other cookie where I created eyes and mouth that goes on top of the filling. After making the circles, it’s time to shape our cookies. I lowered the center of each circle with a teaspoon, creating a nice or half heart shape. Watch the video to understand this step well, indeed it’s much easier to see it than to describe it. On one circle, I created eyes and a mouth. On the other circle, with a piece of shortcrust dough, I created the pumpkin’s tuft. Transfer the cookies onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper as you go.
Now that we have prepared all the cinnamon and pumpkin cookies, we are ready to bake them. Bake one tray at a time for about 15 minutes. It depends on the oven, but don’t keep them more than 18 minutes, or they will become too hard and dry, which is not the result we want. Once baked, let them cool completely on a cooling rack. When the Halloween cookies are completely cool, we can start filling them. Take one of the flat cookies without holes and spread Nutella or Jam on its surface, place the cookie with the eyes and mouth on top, and apply slight pressure. Aren’t they beautiful? Can you smell the cinnamon? Be careful because they are addictive, and you will devour them all!
I just want to remind you that I’m waiting for you on the blog and social channels with lots of food content and more, always live from my kitchen! Have a good appetite!!!
Do you have any other questions or doubts? Write them in the comments or send me a message via chat!
Storing Pumpkin and Cinnamon Cookies:
You can store unbuttered pumpkin cookies in a plastic container with a lid for about 4 or 5 days. They will remain nice and crispy and delicious. If you don’t want to fill them immediately with Nutella or Jam, as they will become stickier, you can do it before enjoying them or serving them to your family or friends.
Recipe Variations:
The main variation I can tell you about is butter, in this butterless shortcrust pastry recipe, it’s the first that comes to mind. You can indeed replace the 80 grams of oil with 70 to 75 grams of softened butter at room temperature. As Grandma suggested, you can increase the cinnamon dose. I don’t particularly love it, so I stopped at two tablespoons, but if you want a stronger aroma, you can add up to four tablespoons.
