12 Nov Caramel Stuffed Pumpkin Pecan Oatmeal Cookies
Y’all. I’m wearing a sweater.
Here in Austin, it’s the first sweater-requiring day of the season. I’m loving it.
I was in Chicago for the weekend visiting my 101 year-old great aunt (amazing, right?). It was cold. The leaves had turned and were starting to fall from the trees. I even sat in my best friend Natalie’s apartment next to a crackling fire (I still had to use a heated blanket) sipping imaginary spiked hot chocolate (#cleanseproblems). It felt like Thanksgiving is two weeks away!
Here in Texas, not so much. Until today, that is. I’ve been itching to get my sweaters and boots out of the closet, and since the weather gods have blessed us with a nice chilly cold front, I’m celebrating!
With cookies. Let’s talk about it.
If any of you spend too much time as much time on Pinterest as I do, then you have probably oggled the multiple drool-inducing caramel stuffed cookie recipes floating around. Kraft Caramels* are my hands down, favorite fall candy. As a kid, I would look forward to the day my mom would finally come home from the grocery store and fill the candy bowl with caramels. Yes, a candy bowl is a thing in our house. And my mom and I are no strangers to emptying the whole thing in the span of a week when it’s filled with caramels. So good. (embrace the sweater body!)
In the spirit of carrying on the tradition, I too have a have a candy bowl in my condo filled to the brim with caramels. Unfortunately, they have recently gone untouched due to my current state of cleanse.
I think they may have felt a little neglected. So to mend our relationship, I surrounded them with a few of my other neglected friends: butter, sugar, and oats.
Oh, and pumpkin. Because it seems to me that pumpkin + caramel may just make a perfect pair. Fall sweets besties of sorts.
Then once they’d all mingled and made friends, I baked them into perfectly soft, spicy fall cookies.
These Caramel Stuffed Pumpkin Pecan Oatmeal Cookies turned out beautifully. The only thing I would change is the “stuffing method”. When I made them, I surrounded a whole, cubed caramel with dough believing that the caramel would melt and lose it’s shape in the oven. In some cases it did, in some it didn’t. Next time I will help the melting-into-a-pool-of-warm-sticky-caramel-process along by flattening the caramels a little bit before stuffing them into cookie dough. Also, make sure you bake them long enough. The pumpkin gives the cookies a orangey-brown tinge that makes it more difficult than usual to tell when the cookies are browning. Check to ensure the edges are set before you remove from the oven.
My mom is already asking for me to make these again at Thanksgiving. You should too!
Enjoy! Xoxo, Katie
*No Kraft did not ask/pay me to say this. They’re just the best. Have you ever tried the store brand? Egh.
Ingredients
- 1 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp. baking soda
- 1 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp. ground ginger
- 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
- Dash of allspice
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 1/2 cup (4 oz.) unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1/2 cup light brown sugar, packed
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 1 large egg white
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup pumpkin puree
- 3/4 cups old-fashioned oats
- 3/4 cups pecan pieces
- 20 soft caramel candies (such as Kraft)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 and line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper.
- In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and salt and whisk to combine. Set aside.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with paddle attachment combine butter and sugars. Cream for 2 minutes.
- Blend in the egg white and vanilla. Add the pumpkin puree and mix until well incorporated.
- Slowly add the flour mixture on low, blending until just incorporated. Add the oats and pecans and blend until they are evenly distributed.
- Cover the bowl and place the dough in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
- While your dough is chilling unwrap your caramels and flatten each one a little bit with the palms of your hands. This will help them melt more evenly.
- Once chilled scoop the dough into ~1 1/2 tablespoon balls. Form a ball with your hands and then flatten it a little bit. Place the caramel in the center then seal the dough around the caramel.
- Bake for 16-18 minutes or until edges of cookies are set. Cool on the baking sheet for at least 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack.
- Store in an airtight container for up to a week.
Recipe adapted from Annie’s Eats.
Mom
Posted at 19:58h, 14 Novemberthese cookies are really to die for!!!
Thepreppedchef
Posted at 09:48h, 20 NovemberThese cookies look amazing. I was so excited to make them yesterday, but they turned out to be a disaster! Don’t know where I went wrong, but the Caramels bled out of the cookie and onto the paper…I couldn’t even get them off so I had to throw them away! I was so sad because they looked and smelled amazing! Any suggestions?
KWahlman
Posted at 09:54h, 20 NovemberOh no! I’m so sorry to hear that! You know, I can’t say for sure why that happened but my advice would be to make sure you seal the caramel well into the center of the dough so that it stays wrapped up in a nice little pocket and doesn’t have the chance to leak out onto the parchment paper. You could also increase the amount of cookie dough to make sure there is enough to keep the caramel covered – nobody doesn’t like a giant cookie!
Kay Pea
Posted at 14:28h, 29 MarchThank you for this recipe! After reading your post, I decided to melt the caramels down with a little bit of milk. Then, I plopped a scoop of cookie dough on the cookie sheet, made a well in the middle, poured some of the liquefied caramel in the middle, then topped with a little more cookie dough to seal it. They turned out fabulous! I didn’t have pecans, so I used chocolate chips. That was a good call.
I will make these again!
KWahlman
Posted at 15:18h, 30 MarchThank you Kay! I love your technique, I’m definitely going to have to try it!