Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies with Maple Glaze

Soft, perfectly pumpkin spiced, and somehow gluten-free and vegan, these pumpkin oatmeal cookies are ideal any time of day, preferably when they’re generously coated in maple glaze.

Please don’t stop reading just because I said gluten-free and vegan!  You will not know it – I promise, these pumpkin oatmeal cookies are amazing and unbelievably easy.

These super soft and delicious cookies came about because — have you caught on to how I create recipes yet? — I was feeling lazy a couple weekends ago.  It was cool and crisp and very October-y outside, we were lounging around watching college football, and I really wanted some pumpkin cookies.  

Normal, right?

I actually have a go-to pumpkin cookie recipe from a friend that is chock full of gluten and definitely not vegan.  It’s also one of those recipes that somehow contains four different kinds of sugar, and it involves creaming of butter and folding of flour and …all those fun baking things I sometimes have the energy to do, but this day did not.

Nope, on this particular day I felt like stirring everything together with a fork and dropping it on a cookie sheet and eating cookies as soon as possible.  I had a football game to watch, after all.  It’s feelings like these that, in the past, have inspired such joys as my easiest chocolate chip cookies, so I knew my lazy tendency had the potential to lead me somewhere new and possibly great.

I have a tried and true recipe for banana breakfast cookies on here that uses only oats for the flour, and I thought maybe I could swap pumpkin in for the banana and use pumpkin spice instead of cinnamon.  I figured I would also have to alter the maple syrup amount slightly since pumpkin is not nearly as sweet as bananas.  On the whole, though, these were already shaping up to be FAR healthier and easier than my traditional recipe, and the only question was whether they’d measure up in taste.

Spoiler alert: they did.

How a few simple ingredients like oats, olive oil, maple syrup, pumpkin purée and some spices can come together and create something this magical without the use of eggs, butter, or sugar, I still really don’t know.  

But it worked!  All you need is a blender to grind half the oats into flour, and half of them into chopped pieces.  Then you stir them with the rest of the ingredients until well-combined (no gluten formation to worry about here, yay!), portion them out, and bake.  The whole thing takes about 10 minutes (less if you’re faster at measuring than me), plus baking time.  The pumpkin oatmeal cookies come out soft, perfectly spiced, and just sweet enough to curb the cookie craving but not cloyingly sweet.  Hooray!

One caveat: I am of the opinion that nearly everything benefits from a maple glaze, and these pumpkin oatmeal cookies were no different.  They came out of the oven smelling amazing, and they tasted amazing too, but they were just a little too plain for a dessert cookie.  So I made a simple glaze of 1/2 cup powdered sugar and 2 tbsp maple syrup to drizzle on, and it made all the difference.

Could you skip the glaze and call these breakfast cookies?  Definitely.  Would I tell anyone if you used the glaze and still called them breakfast cookies?  Definitely not.

I highly recommend trying these on a day you’re feeling only semi-ambitious in the kitchen.  You’ll feel super accomplished in a very short amount of time.  And you’ll have cookies — but not for long.

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Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies with Maple Glaze

Prep Time

10 mins

Cook Time

15 mins

Total Time

25 mins

 

Soft, perfectly pumpkin spiced, and somehow gluten-free and vegan, these pumpkin oatmeal cookies are ideal any time of day, preferably when they’re generously coated in maple glaze.

Course: Breakfast, Dessert

Keyword: cookies, oatmeal, pumpkin

Yield: 18 cookies

Author: katiebirdbakes.com

Ingredients

For the pumpkin oatmeal cookies:

• 2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats, divided (see below)*
• 1 cup canned pumpkin puree
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/3 cup pure maple syrup
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

For the maple glaze:

• 1/2 cup powdered (confectioner’s) sugar
• 2 Tablespoons pure maple syrup

Instructions

For the pumpkin oatmeal cookies:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Place 1 cup of the rolled oats in a food processor or high-speed blender and blend on high speed until the oats become a flour-like consistency – you now have oat flour. Place in a large bowl.

2. Take the other 1 cup of rolled oats and place in the same food processor or blender, and pulse or blend on low speed until the oats are in small pieces – about 30 seconds. Do not grind them into a flour. Place in the same large bowl with the oat flour.

3. Add the pumpkin puree, olive oil, maple syrup, baking soda, pumpkin pie spice, and salt to the bowl and stir vigorously (I like to use a fork) until everything is well-blended. 

4. Scoop batter using a cookie scoop or a tablespoon onto two baking sheets lined with parchment. Bake for 15 minutes, or until edges are golden and cookies are set.  They will be soft!

For the maple glaze:

1. While cookies are baking, in a small bowl whisk together powdered sugar and maple syrup until smooth.  Drizzle over cookies in whatever pattern you like!

Recipe Notes

*NOTE: steel-cut oats will not work in this recipe.  Use the flat, old-fashioned rolled oats!

 

 

Cookies keep for 2-3 days well-wrapped on the counter, or 1 week in the fridge.  You can also freeze them wrapped individually in plastic wrap, and then microwave for 10-15 seconds any time the cookie craving strikes.

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