BAKE: The Great Pumpkin Spritz
- Pumpkin Spice Spritz Cookie Ingredients:
- Equipment & Method to Pipe Pumpkin-Shaped Spritz Cookies:
- 🎃 All Hallowed Halloween and Spooptober Pumpkin Post-Roundup 🎃
These piped pumpkin spritz cookies are fun and festive treats that look much harder to make than they are. Add these pumpkin spice flavored cute little cookies to your Halloween treat bags for friends or coworkers, or brighten up your Thanksgiving desert table with a sweet little nibble that isn’t pie. They look like you spent all day, but you can whip these up in an hour or so (and no messy icing or rolling and cutting and flour everywhere like most festive cookies).
Pumpkin Spice Spritz Cookie Ingredients:
Butter
White Sugar
Whole Egg + Yolk (for taller cookies that spread less, use just two yolks instead of the whole egg. Using one whole egg + one yolk makes wider, more tender cookies like the ones pictured)
Vanilla Extract & Pumpkin Spice Extract
You can flavor these cookies however you like, but this combination of classic vanilla with warm and cinnamon-scented pumpkin spice extract gives these a seasonal flair.
Salt
Milk or Half and Half
You’ll mix in just enough milk or cream to thin the dough enough to pipe easily (without bursting the bag) but not so much that the cookies don’t hold their shape. You’ll need more milk if you make the dough with 2 egg yolks vs one whole egg and one yolk. I used one whole egg in the dough, and about two tablespoons of half and half. The dough should still be pretty stiff, but looser… like very thick mashed potatoes, or deviled egg mixture, but thinner than play-dough.
Orange and Green Food coloring
After mixing in the cream, I divided the dough before coloring it. Scoop out about a cup of the dough to a smaller bowl (maybe a quarter of the batch) to dye green for the pumpkin tops (any extra you can pipe into flat “shell” shapes or squiggles to make leaves and vines). I used about a 1/4 tsp of powdered professional orange food coloring in the main dough but you can also use liquid regular or natural food coloring (use a mix of red and yellow if you don’t have orange coloring pre-mixed)… For the green, I used about 9 drops of standard green coloring.
Equipment & Method to Pipe Pumpkin-Shaped Spritz Cookies:
Sturdy Piping Bag:
This dough is thick, so plastic piping bags won’t cut it. Pick up a couple lined canvas Ateco piping bags and you’ll be set for your cookie and cake decorating needs for years. They’re hand-washable (just use dish soap and water- turn them inside out if you want to be sure you got them clean) and have a sturdy metal grommet to hang them up to dry. Once they’re completely dry, fold and stash them in your baking drawer… you can sanitize them with a very diluted bleach water bath if you’re concerned, but as long as you clean them well and never fold and put them away wet, they’ll last an average baker for a very long time. Two bags will make these cookies quicker, as you won’t have to wash the bag between piping the orange and green dough.
To fill the bags, put the star tip in the end and grasp the piping bag, then fold the edges back over your hand like a cuff. Then use a sturdy spatula to fill the piping bag with dough. A plastic bench scraper is useful for squeezing the last bits of dough from the pastry bag as you pipe the cookies (lay the piping bag flat on the counter, and use the bench scraper to push the dough towards the tip).
Large Star tip(s) :
I used an Ateco 822 large open star tip for the orange pumpkin dough and a smaller 829 open star tip for the green stems, leaves, and vines. You can get both and eight other tips in this bundle or use a similar size and shape tip to these.
Stand Mixer:
A stand mixer makes creaming the butter and sugar and incorporating the dry ingredients a breeze, so if you have one, use it!
or
Large Mixing Bowl and Sturdy Spatula or Hand Mixer:
You can definitely make these by hand or with a hand-held mixer. Soften the butter and cut it into chunks so it’s easier to cream together well with the sugar before adding the egg yolks (or yolk + whole egg).
The Great Pumpkin Spritz Cookies
Equipment
- sturdy pastry bag
- large and medium open star piping tips
Ingredients
- 8 oz butter (2 sticks/16 tbsp)
- ¾ cup white sugar
- 1 large whole egg
- 1 egg yolk
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- ½ tsp pumpkin spice extract
- 2 ¼ cups all purpose flour
- 1-3 tbsp milk or cream
Instructions
- Cream softened butter either by hand or with the paddle attachment of a mixer until smooth, scrape down the sides of the bowl, and add sugar. Continue creaming the butter and sugar together, stopping a few times to scrape the sides and horn of the bowl (if applicable), until the mixture is light and fluffy.
- Add the salt, the egg, and the egg yolks, one at a time, and the vanilla and pumpkin spice extract. Scrape the sides of the bowl and mix again until the mixture is well-emulsified.
- Add the flour, one cup at a time, mixing only a few seconds between each addition, stopping to scrape the sides and paddle of the mixer. If mixing by hand, fold the flour gently in to the wet ingredients. Mix until well combined.
- Divide dough into two bowls- remove about ¼ of the dough to dye green for the stems, leaves, and vines, and add orange coloring to the rest (or a mix of red and yellow coloring until the desired shade is reached). Mix just enough to incorporate the dye. Too much mixing will make tough cookies.
- Add a spoonful of dough to your piping bag fitted with a large star tip (½" diameter open star tip is a good one to start with) and check the consistency. If the dough is too stiff to pipe easily, you can add up to a few tablespoons of milk to thin the dough slightly. When the consistency is right, fill your piping bag(s) no more than two-thirds full and pipe your cookies.
- Preheat the oven to 350℉. Get your cookie sheets ready and line them with nonstick silicone baking liners or parchment paper so the cookies don't stick to the sheets and break.
- If you have multiple bags and tips you can fill both, or do one color at a time and wash the bag between batches. Pipe the orange dough first, holding the piping bag perpendicular to the cookie sheet to form pumpkin shapes, then top them with smaller dabs of green dough to make stems. Use up any leftover green dough by piping flat leaves and squiggly vines to make stem shapes.
- If you are using decorative sugar or sprinkles, add these to the dough before baking. You can also leave them plain, and decorate them with royal icing after they have baked and cooled.
- Bake for 9-12 minutes, or until the cookies are just set to the touch but not browning. Remove from oven and let cool for a few minutes, then use a thin metal spatula to transfer to wire racks to cool. If you are doing a big batch and need to reuse cookie sheets, make sure the sheets cool between batches before piping more cookies.
🎃 All Hallowed Halloween and Spooptober Pumpkin Post-Roundup 🎃