Soft Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

They’re soft, a little cakey, loaded with chocolate chips, and they don’t need a stand mixer or a chill time. Bowl, spoon, sheet pan, done.

If you’ve made pumpkin bread before, the batter here will feel familiar. It’s wetter than a normal cookie dough — that’s the pumpkin talking — and that’s exactly why these bake up soft instead of crisp.

Why This Works

Canned pumpkin puree is mostly water. That water has to go somewhere, and in this recipe it goes into softness instead of spread — these cookies puff up and stay tall rather than flattening into thin discs the way a butter-heavy cookie would.

The baking soda dissolved in milk (instead of just whisked into the dry mix) reacts a beat faster and more evenly, which helps these rise properly instead of spreading thin under all that moisture. Skip that step and stir the soda straight into the flour, and you’ll get patchier rise — some cookies puffed, some flatter, no real consistency tray to tray.

Ingredients

• 1 cup (245 g) canned pumpkin puree — don’t use the whole can
• 1 cup (200 g) granulated sugar
• ½ cup vegetable oil (avocado oil works too)
• 1 large egg
• 1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon milk
• 2 cups (270 g) all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (add an extra teaspoon if you like it spicier)
• ½ teaspoon fine sea salt
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, more if you’re not counting

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment or a silicone mat.
2. In a large bowl, stir together the pumpkin puree, sugar, oil, vanilla, and egg until smooth.
3. In a small bowl, dissolve the baking soda in the milk — it’ll fizz a little, that’s normal. Stir it into the wet ingredients.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, pumpkin pie spice, and salt.
5. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and stir just until a few flour streaks remain. Overmixing here is how you end up with tough, dense cookies instead of soft ones.
6. Fold in the chocolate chips. Stop as soon as they’re distributed — don’t keep stirring.
7. Scoop the dough about 2 inches apart onto the prepared sheet. A medium cookie scoop keeps them even, but a spoon works fine too.
8. Press a few extra chips on top if you want them to look bakery-style.
9. Bake 10–13 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean and the bottoms are lightly browned. [PLACEHOLDER: In my oven, 11 minutes is the sweet spot — your mileage may vary depending on how hot your oven actually runs versus what the dial says.]
10. If the centers still look underdone, give them another 1–2 minutes and check again.
11. Let the cookies sit on the pan for 5 minutes — they’re fragile straight out of the oven — then move them to a rack to cool the rest of the way.
12. Store in a covered container once fully cool.

Prep time: 15 minutes Cook time: 10 minutes Cool time: 40 minutes Total time: 1 hour 5 minutes Servings: 24 cookies

Tips

• Spoon and level your flour instead of scooping straight from the bag. Scooping packs in extra flour and dries these out — they go from soft to cakey-dry fast.
• Measure the pumpkin puree instead of using the whole can. A standard can is closer to 1¾–2 cups, and dumping it all in throws off the whole ratio.
• Don’t skip the 5-minute rest on the pan. Pull them too early and they’ll fall apart when you try to move them — the structure needs a minute to set.

Variations

Swap half the chocolate chips for chopped pecans if you want some crunch against the soft crumb — that one’s worth doing. Skip white chocolate chips, though; they turn cloying against the pumpkin spice instead of balancing it. A cream cheese glaze drizzled on top also works if you want to push these closer to pumpkin bread territory, but honestly, plain is the better cookie.

Make-Ahead

The raw dough doesn’t hold up well in the fridge overnight — it gets denser and the cookies bake up tighter and less soft the next day. If you want to prep ahead, scoop the dough onto a sheet pan and freeze the balls solid, then transfer to a bag. Bake straight from frozen, adding 1–2 extra minutes.

FAQ

Closing Thoughts

Pair them with a mug of something warm and spiced, or crumble one over vanilla ice cream if you’ve got extras that are starting to go a little stale.