Gluten Free Pumpkin Cookies

These gluten free pumpkin cookies are the perfect mixture of sweetness, and pumpkin spice. Just like a Crumbl Pumpkin cake cookie, but gluten free! 

Are you ready for fall flavors yet? I know it’s only August, but believe it or not, the pumpkins in our garden have turned orange, and for me, that means one thing – time for pumpkin everything!

This recipe and post is sponsored by Judee’s Ingredients. All opinions are my own, and I could’t be more thrilled to be partnered with a company I love and whose products I use so much! Their sponsorship means a lot to me, and I hope you enjoy this recipe as much I my kids and I have. 

Don’t get me wrong, I adore all of our summer cooking and desserts, but the warm spiciness of pumpkin has my heart. I think it’s a comfort food thing. 

Why do I love this recipe so much?

This particular recipe is one of my favorites so far, and that’s saying something because it’s really hard-to-beat pumpkin spice French toast. 

The combination of a cakey cookie filled with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger and topped with cream cheese icing is just *chef’s kiss*. And that’s before topping them with chocolate. That might just cross into epic territory. 

I’m a huge fan of simple drop cooking like gluten free pumpkin snickerdoodle, but these are totally and completely worth taking a few extra minutes for. 

Don’t let the two parts of making both cookie and icing fool you, though – these are still very easy cookies to make. All you need is a few ingredients and either a mixer or a strong whisking arm. (you could also buy remade icing, but honestly, it only has half the flavor of homemade cream cheese icing.)

Gluten free cookies have a bit of a reputation for being tricky to make, and with good reason, but I feel like this recipe checks all the boxes for being both easy to make and incredibly good. They don’t fall apart at all, but they’re still soft and moist while being full of excellent flavor. I think this might be one of the recipes I’m most proud of so far. 

Gluten Free Pumpkin Cookies

With that said, I have a few recommendations for you. 

• Use a neutral-tasting blend of flours. Sometimes if you use just one type of flour, your baked goods can be funny tasting, so I like to use a blend. In this case, I use Judee’s quinoa, teff, and arrowroot powder. I wouldn’t necessarily call teff neutral, but while quinoa is relatively neutral, and I do use it alone with starch fairly often, I think that using a small amount of teff – a different flavor helped bring some balance.
• This dough is a little sticky. With gluten free flour, you don’t always have the luxury of an easy-to-handle dough and a great final product together. So instead, we sacrifice the easy dough so we can have excellent results. It’s worth the trade. The point is, though, that you need to dip your cup in starch or powdered sugar before you press down your cookies so they don’t stick.
• Shape your cookies before you bake them. If you press it down into an oblong, it’s going to stay oblong, so use your powdered sugar-coated fingers to make round edges if you need to before baking. You can see in the photos that not all my cookies are round because I didn’t shape all of them well. 5/10 on the presentation, but hey, they taste the same!

So let’s bake. 

Get your ingredients together. 

Once you’re ready to go, combine your dry ingredients. 

Set them aside, and work on the wet ingredients. 

Beat butter and sugars together until fluffy, then beat in your eggs, vanilla, and pumpkin.

Next, stir in your dry ingredients. 

Lastly, for the cookies, scoop them by the tablespoon onto a parchment-lined pan, and flatten them to about 1/4 inch by dipping a flatten-bottomed cup or measuring cup into powdered sugar or starch to keep it from sticking. Bake for 10 minutes, then let them cool on a wire rack

While the cookies cool, make the icing. 

Simply combine the butter, cream cheese, vanilla, and powdered sugar until smooth.

Then ice your cookies.

And lastly? Add some cacao nibs. 

So good!

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