Slice and bake pumpkin cookies

Halloween Cookies Recipe

Chef Penny demonstrates how to make your own pumpkin slice-and-bake cookies.

Slice-and-bake cookies combine convenience and nostalgia, and these pumpkin cookies with purple sparkles are a fun and festive way to celebrate the holiday.

Making these from scratch adds a hands-on activity for the family and ensures you know exactly what you're eating.

Plus, you can be creative and customize the design to your liking. Simply follow this recipe and technique from Chef Penny Stankiewicz to make your dough, and refrigerate the roll until you're ready to bake and serve.

More cookie recipes.

Recipe

Slice-and-Bake Pumpkin Cookies

Ingredients

  • 225 grams unsalted butter
  • 322 grams white granulated sugar
  • 3.5 grams kosher salt
  • 1 egg
  • 5 grams vanilla extract
  • 300 grams all-purpose flour
  • Orange and green gel paste food color, as needed
  • Colored sanding sugar, as desired (I used purple)
  • 1 egg white, for assembly

Slice and bake pumpkin cookies

Directions

  1. In the bowl of a KitchenAid mixer, cream together the sugar and the butter and salt with the paddle on medium speed until the mixture is light and fluffy.
  2. Add eggs one at a time, followed by vanilla.
  3. Add flour in 2-3 increments, lowering the speed so it stays in the bowl, and mix only until combined.
  4. Separate the dough into three parts, one batch of 500 grams, leave natural color. Color 300 grams with orange gel paste food color, and color 100 grams green.
  5. Starting with the orange color, form a log. Shape the log into more of a pumpkin shape by making a grove down the center of the log, tapering the bottom a bit. Remember the shape is only visible when the cookie is cut, so keep the general log shape, and manipulate it so it resembles the pumpkin shape from the front only. Use any real pumpkin shape for inspiration. Chill this until firm.
  6. Roll the green into a log. Brush some egg white down the center of the chilled orange log’s ridge. Place the green log in the center of the groove of the orange pumpkin-shaped log, and create a form that resembles the stem of the pumpkin from the front. Chill this until firm.
  7. When the pumpkin log is fully chilled and firm, brush it entirely with egg white. Roll thinner logs of the naturally colored dough, and fit it into any of the grooves around the form you’ve created, starting around the stem. You’re working to build the neutral-colored dough around the pumpkin to encase it in the uncolored dough. Use as many small logs to do this as you need to. Then roll out the rest of this dough very thickly, as long and as wide as your log is. The dough will be about 1-inch thick. Brush your log once more with egg white, and wrap this layer of dough all the way around, enclosing your pattern completely in the neutral-colored dough. Wrap this in parchment paper, and roll it so that it's smooth all the way around. Chill this one more time.
  8. Remove from the wrapping. Brush the log once more with egg white, and roll it in your colored sanding sugar.
  9. Cut slices about 1/3-inch thick. You’ll need to cut past the end of the roll to start seeing the clear image. Place these on a lined cookie sheet or sheet pan, and bake in a preheated 350 F standard oven (300 F for convection). Bake just until set and barely light golden. You don’t want to add too much color to these cookies. About 8-11 minutes.

Learn more about studying Pastry & Baking Arts with Chef Penny at our New York campus.

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Submitted by Marissa W on October 12, 2020 2:36pm

I love these! It's kind of got a funky style to them! This is just me, but I think we could even make these work for Christmas, using Christmas colors.

Submitted by Donna on October 16, 2020 3:43pm

Going to try this. How do you keep the cookie round when you slice it. Should it be chilled  to almost frozen before slicing ?

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