These Vegan Pumpkin Cookies are honestly one of the BEST cookie inventions I’ve ever come up with. Thick, chewy, packed with chocolate chips, and loaded with seasonal Autumn spices that feel oh-so-cozy eaten with a warm mug of coffee.

My family and I had a found a lot of joy in our allotment this summer – even more so because of the lockdown restrictions in the UK – and one of the new things we decided to grow was pumpkins.

It was a huge success – our pumpkins were absolutely enormous and we had so many of them! Thankfully, my parents live almost opposite a primary school so they could give a large batch of the pumpkins away to the kids for Halloween. Of course, I made sure to reserve a couple for myself for baking up some pumpkin goodies – like these super fluffy pumpkin muffins!

These vegan pumpkin cookies are one of the first things I tried when I made my first batch of pumpkin puree (which is so easy to make yourself!). They are:

• Thick
• Chewy
• Loaded with seasonal spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger
• Packed with vegan chocolate chips
• So easy to make

If you want a more classic cookie recipe, make sure you checked out my vegan chocolate chip cookies, or these super simple 3-ingredient peanut butter cookies!

Making these vegan pumpkin chocolate chip cookies

To make these cookies, you’ll start by combining your flour, baking soda, salt, and spices.

I used 1 tsp of cinnamon and 1 tsp of mixed spice in my cookies. Mixed spice contains a mix of spices (duh!) including cinnamon, coriander seed, caraway, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and allspice.

Pumpkin spice mix isn’t as readily available here in the UK as it is in the US, but you could definitely substitute the spices for pumpkin spice if you have it!

In a separate bowl, you’ll combine coconut oil, brown sugar, caster sugar, pumpkin puree, maple syrup, and plant-based milk, and then add the wet mix to the dry.

Once stirred, the cookie dough will be fairly thick – fold in the chocolate chips and then chill for about 45 minutes.

Chilling the cookie dough before baking

I experimented different chill times with this recipe. Baking with no chill meant the cookies spread quite wide on the baking tray and lost that thick, chewy texture. Chilling for over an hour meant the cookies retained their shape a little more than I would have liked, so 45 minutes was the perfect middle ground.

While the vegan pumpkin cookie dough is chilling, preheat the oven to 180 degrees C and line a large baking tray with parchment paper. If you don’t have a big enough baking tray, bake your cookies in batches!

Bake the cookies for 10 minutes. They’ll be very soft still when you first remove them, but they firm up nicely while cooling so don’t worry! I also chose to press some extra chocolate chips into the tops which make the cookies look that extra bit special.