An abundance of winter squash in my CSA basket and an invitation to a cookie swap inspired me to try this pumpkin chocolate chip cookie recipe from King Arthur Flour.

Wow. What a great recipe. The result is a rich, pumpkiny-spicy-chocolatey cookie with a cake-like texture. So delicious.

As usual, I tweaked the recipe to suit my tastes, substituting whole wheat flour for half the all-purpose flour and using freshly-baked pureed squash instead of (horrors!) canned pumpkin. I used kabocha squash because that’s what was in the CSA basket this week, but I’m sure any winter squash would do. Or fresh, local pumpkin, of course.

After (should’ve done this before – oh well) I finished baking, I read some of the comments on the recipe page. It turns out that if you use whole wheat flour, KAF recommends flattening the cookies before baking since they won’t spread as much as all white flour cookies will. So you may want to try that. However I think my non-flattened whole wheat cookies still came out pretty good.

KAF advertises this as a Halloween cookie but, hey, I like baking with squash any time of year. Whole squash stores well and baked squash freezes well so there’s no need to confine enjoyment of this versatile vegetable to autumn.

I hope they don’t mind that I’m taking these to a Christmas cookie swap!

Here’s the local analysis:

Local — squash, butter, eggs

Non-local — flour, baking powder and soda, sugar, spices, salt, walnuts, chocolate chips