Caramelised White Chocolate, Pecan & Pumpkin Spice Cookies

I don’t understand why there’s a “season” for pumpkin spice themed dishes when delicious pumpkin puree is available (from a can) all year round. In honour of this recent discovery, I decided to make these cookies. I was influenced by a recipe on Bon Appetitwhich incorporated pumpkin and various spices into a cookie. However - I was very disappointed by the result: the cookies were mean and thin, with root canal problem-inducing sweetness, overly egg-y, and totally lacking in the promised pumpkin flavour.

So, I made my own to tick the 3 commandments of cookies:

-      Chewy

-      Molten

-      Thick

I radically amped up the amount of pumpkin, and reduced the sugar. I also added both white and milk chocolate, so that, upon baking, they caramelized, creating a sophisticated toffee flavour. The added crunch and maple-flavour of the pecans add some complexity, too.

NB If you would like a more savoury cookie, you could switch the milk and white chocolate for dark chocolate. And if you’d like to have a supply of cookies for emergencies, you can freeze the scoops of uncooked cookie dough and bake them when desired. 

Pumpkin spice cookies (makes 20-22)

Ingredients

150 unsalted butter, softened

80g light brown sugar

70g caster sugar

1 egg

40g pumpkin puree

1 ½ tsp vanilla extract

½ tsp cinnamon

1 ½ tsp ground ginger

¼ tsp ground nutmeg

1/8 tsp mixed spice

220g plain flour

heaped ½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

100g white chocolate + 30 g white chocolate for topping (I use buttons but you can chop up a bar or use chips instead)

50g milk chocolate, roughly chopped

50g chopped pecans, + 20g for topping

2 large baking trays, lined with baking parchment

Method

1)    Put the unsalted butter, light brown sugar and caster sugar into the bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with the paddle, and beat until light and fluffy (about 5 minutes). If doing by hand, beat ingredients together with a spoon. Add the egg, pumpkin puree and vanilla extract, and beat until full combined.

2)    Add the spices (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, mixed spice), flour, baking powder and salt to the wet ingredients, and very gently fold together until almost combined, leaving some flour still visible.  Add the chopped milk chocolate, white chocolate and pecans, and very gently fold them into the cookie dough until combined.

3)    Cover the bowl and refrigerate for minimum 1 hour and up to 24 hours (until you’re ready to bake the cookies).

4)   Preheat the oven to 180°C. Then. either using an ice cream scoop, or a tablespoon, scoop the cookie dough into 40g dollops. I weigh each one to make sure they cook evenly, but if you can’t be bothered just estimate. Roll each into a sphere between your palms to ensure that they bake into near-perfect rounds. Place on the tray leaving about 4cm between each so that they have room to spread when they bake. Then, into each sphere, press a piece of white chocolate and a piece of pecan.

5)   Place in oven to bake for 7-10 minutes, or until they are golden at the edges but still soft to the touch. Once they are removed from the oven, they will continue to cook on the baking tray so leave them to sit for a couple of minutes. Serve warm if you can’t wait, or keep them for up to 4 days in an airtight container. You can also freeze them in an airtight container for up to 3 months.

HUNGRY FOR MORE?

Pear & Speculoos Caramelised Cookie Magic Cake

Maybe they think that all the gluttony and swollen stomachs affect our ability to digest information, that all the turkey/mince/fruit/chocolate/stuffing becomes blinding and we are no longer able to read paragraphs of text.  Instead, we have to have things numbered so as to reassure us that whatever we are reading won’t detract too long from the Christmas stasis.  

Every newspaper or magazine clearly has some greedy journalist on its team who takes it upon him or herself to rate every mince pie out there to save us all the hard work. Then the subjective lists are compiled and played back to us year after year, despite the foods remaining the same, in the identical, consumable, numbered format.

In response to this, and inspired by an affront to my eyes when opening the newspaper magazine this weekend, I thought I would do a light review of the food adverts themselves:

WAITROSE

Apparently, it’s for fruit lovers: congealed, glistening and with blood/jam trickling through its rivulets. But what is it? Depends how you like your desserts, but I’ll pass.

1/5

SAINSBURY’S

I know Christmas is supposedly about family and coming together, but the picture of “grandma” with a prawn coming out of her head doesn’t conjure up any feelings of warmth for me 

1/5

BOURSIN

I’ve caught members of my family spooning Boursin directly into their mouths. I was cynical at first about their Christmas rebrand with the addition of the “merry” epithet. But somehow, heady with garlicky creaminess, it has caught on in my household – we are now asking each other whether we’d like some “Merry Boursin” on our toast.

4/5

LIDL

Lidl has gone down the particularly salivating route in showing us the turkeys pre-slaughter. They are relaxing free range by a bale of hay with the sun shining to stained glass effect through the translucent wattles. Delicious.

0/5

Anyway, with all this Christmas “magic” abounding (and as a remedy for all this gaudiness), we might as well move on to an actual “magic” cake. Making a cake is magical enough, but there is a childlike joy when you put a homogeneous mix into the oven and it emerges, burnished, in perfectly ordered layers. This particular magic cake is like a perfectly formed French entremet, but without the effort.  All it requires is eggs to be separated and whisked and somehow it all falls into place. When making the speculoos topping, I would advise making a bit extra to allow some innocent “sampling” during the process (it’s ambrosial).

Ingredients

Speculoos layer

300g Speculoos cookies + 100g for decoration

220ml unsweetened condensed milk

¼ tsp salt

Cake

3 eggs, separated

75g caster sugar

90g unsalted butter

50g plain flour

¼ tsp salt

300ml milk

4 small pears, peeled, cored and diced into 1cm cubes

21cm square cake tin (or round tin with similar area) fully lined with baking parchment.  It doesn’t matter if the tin is marginally larger or smaller

Method

1)    Preheat the oven to 150°C

2)    Put all the ingredients for the speculoos layer into a blender and blitz until smooth, and set aside.

3)    Melt the butter and set aside to cool. In a bowl (if doing by hand) or electric mixer beat the sugar with the egg yolks until thick and pale. Pour in the butter and 150g of the Speculoos layer and gently combine. Then sieve in the flour and salt and fold to combine. Pour in the milk and combine.

4)    In the bone-dry bowl of an electric mixer or by hand, whisk the egg whites vigorously until they thicken and hold their shape in stiff peaks. Very gently fold them into the batter, taking care to preserve the aeration.

5)    Scatter the diced pear evenly on the bottom of the cake tin, then gently pour the batter on top. Smooth the surface with a knife and place in the oven to cake for 35 minutes. The cake will still be soft when you remove it from the oven but this is how it is meant to be. Put it onto a rack to cool to room temperature, then place in the fridge for an hour to set.

6)    To serve, lift the cake out of the tin on the serving plate using the baking parchment and remove baking parchment. I choose to slice off the cake edges in order to better expose the layers. Spread the remaining speculoos layer on top and over it crumble the decorative speculoos cookies.

Recipe adapted from "Magic Cakes" by Christelle Huet-Gomez