Miso Pumpkin Cookies with Mini Peanut Butter Cups

Not to downplay my soft pumpkin snickerdoodle cookies, if you like a more cakey cookie, but these miso pumpkin cookies have been a hit this year! I packed a half dozen for my dog groomer since she happened to come by while I was testing this recipe. 

I got a text from her the next day saying “Your cookies are magical! I’ve never had a cookie that’s like biting into cloud! Flavor was perfect!!!” I’m not making this up, I have proof in my text chain! 

I also made a batch for my trick-or-treating station at work and everyone came by with positive reviews! I tested them 4 times so I promise you they will work beautifully.

Ingredients and useful notes

You’ll need 11 ingredients for this miso pumpkin cookies recipe, pictured below. As always, you can find the full list of ingredients with quantities and step-by-step instructions in the recipe card.

Dry the pumpkin

I wanted to make a more chewy pumpkin cookie for this recipe so I searched high and low to see what others are doing to combat this cakey pumpkin cookie issue. I learned from In Bloom Bakery and Sally’s Baking Addiction that drying your pumpkin will do the trick.

The reason is that pumpkin contains about 90% water, this makes the cookies cakey like muffin tops, which is not a bad thing. But if you’re looking for that chewy texture, you’ll need to limit the amount of liquid added to the cookie dough.

So this recipe calls for patting the pumpkin dry on a plate using paper towels. I just press the paper towel on the pumpkin and squeeze out the water in the sink until no more water can be squeezed out anymore. You’ll want to reduce the pumpkin by about half its original volume or weight.

A note of caution, if you use a cheesecloth to squeeze out the water, this will work too, but you will likely end up removing too much water. I tried this and my pumpkin reduced way too much. I didn’t bake the cookies with this super dry pumpkin but I suspect it may make your cookies too dry. So if you do use a cheesecloth, don’t go all the way, just squeeze out enough water to reduce your pumpkin by half.

About the miso

I typically use Marukome premium white miso paste in a lot of my miso desserts. For this recipe, I used a sweet white miso that has reduced sodium but is a bit saltier than the Marukome brand. It contains 570 mg of sodium per 24 grams serving size, compared to 290 mg of sodium per 18 grams serving size. 

So for the amount I used in this recipe (¼ cup or 70 grams), the amount of sodium is 1662 mg. This is between half and ¾ teaspoon of salt. This number will be useful if you are using a different type of miso with different sodium content or rather omit the miso all together. 

But note that the miso also contributes to the liquid ingredients which make these cookies more moist, so omitting miso may result in dryer cookies.

Notes on mini peanut butter cup and substitutions

I added just a few mini peanut butter cups on top of the cookie dough balls just before baking for even distribution, and also to preserve their integrity. If you mix the mini PB cups into the batter, the beater can destroy them pretty easily. You can also add more or less to your preference but I feel like between 3-5 mini PB cups is enough per cookie.

You can also substitute chocolate chips and peanut butter chips – this combination was great in these chocolate peanut butter chip cookies. Again for even distribution, add them by hand on top of the cookie dough balls or if you don’t care too much, then just mix them into the dough.

You can also omit the mix-ins for the best chewy pumpkin snickerdoodle cookies. Or make half batch with mix-ins and half without. It’s choose your own pumpkin cookie adventure!

Update note: the original recipe used Butterfinger Skull for Halloween but those are no longer available so I updated the recipe to use generic mini peanut butter cups to make ingredient sourcing easier.