C is for cookie

I'm making cookies today while the baby naps. Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, one of my tried and true fewer than five ingredients recipes. This one involves a spice cake mix (or a white cake mix and pumpkin pie spice, in a pinch. Or yellow cake mix and cinnamon and nutmeg, in an even greater pinch. It's a method, really), a can of pure pumpkin (NOT pumpkin pie filling, just pumpkin), and chocolate chips, as many as you think necessary. It's a transplanted recipe from UT that my mother called to share as soon as she found out about it because where do you think I get my love of all things simple in the kitchen??

I was going to jazz up the recipe by adding chopped pecans, but then I thought, why mess with a good thing? I may still, however, drizzle some cinnamon powered sugar glaze over them to make them more...ummm...special? shower appropriate? pretty? I was inspired by a woman in our congregation who made similar cookies and included the icing drizzle over some of them. Well, her cookies were actually three varieties, plain pumpkin, chocolate chip, and nuts, and they weren't so much drop cookies as perfectly formed circles, and they didn't so much come from a mix and a can as totally from scratch. But other than that, they were exactly the same! Regardless, the icing looked like a simple addition of two more ingredients (water doesn't count) with a big TA-DA factor (if I can do it as artfully as she did, a real question. However, I am more confident in my cooking abilities than I am in my artistic abilities, generally.) I'm sure I've mentioned these cookies before, since they are a favorite of mine, particularly once Fall has arrived and the ingredients are more readily available.

J is asleep, which is why I'm making them now, because his new crawling abilities make him a liability in the kitchen when I have to use the oven. So I'm making the cookies VERY QUIETLY so he stays asleep. I feel like all noises in the kitchen, just down the hall from his room, are amplified an hundred fold and he is not the most solid sleeper. The husband used to say, back when J was taking 25 minute naps, that the baby could "sleep through anything for half an hour" but then he would always wake up. I wanted to smack the husband every time he said this, since sad experience had taught me that the baby would, in fact, not sleep through much at all, ever. The husband would say I'm obsessive about noises (particularly those he makes), but I would say I'm just circumspect. And desperate for J to stay asleep at any cost!!!