This treat incorporates two of my favorite things as it relates to cooking - baking and fall. While Mr. Hawkeye Plate is the primary chef of our house, I am definitely the executive pastry chef. I think the process of baking is really fun and, with my huge sweet tooth, I really love the end product. I stumbled upon a recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip cookie bars in a fall themed magazine several years ago, and I added it to my collected recipes cookbook. This is a great idea for a Christmas gift I got from my mom when I was in college. It's a small binder with index cards that are used for writing down family recipes, magazine recipes, internet recipes, etc. It's much more organized than just scraps of paper thrown into a folder.


Back to the pumpkin bars... Last weekend I traveled with my family to spend the weekend with my great-grandma and great-aunt. I baked these treats the night before I left, so we would have something sweet to snack on. I didn't have a lot of time for baking, so the cookie bars were a great time saving option. Cookies can really only be baked a dozen at a time, and they take longer to individually shape or drop onto the cookie sheet. On the other hand, bars are baked at one time and then sliced at the end.

The recipe is basically a standard chocolate chip cookie recipe with the addition of canned pumpkin and pumpkin pie spice. The pumpkin and spice give the bars that "fall" taste that is so loved this type of year, and the pumpkin also keeps the cookies really dense and chewy which are great adjectives for baked goods, in my opinion. I did the usual routine for baking - beat together the butter, sugar, egg, vanilla, and pumpkin; add in the dry ingredients; and bake at 350. In this case they baked for about 35 minutes.

At that point I let them cool, sliced them, and packed them up for the travel 'up north'. If you have a lazy Sunday afternoon when you're looking for a fall-like activity give baking with pumpkin a shot!