Pumpkin Shortbread Cookies

Pumpkin Shortbread Cookies are made with decadent pumpkin butter. These cookies retain the shape you cut them out in, so you always wind up with beautiful cookies. Also, pumpkin! 😀 

On Monday I posted my new favorite pumpkin butter recipe. That pumpkin butter came in handy with what I wanted to do next.

I spent most of August thinking about what sort of recipes I wanted to do this year. One was a shortbread cookie…but I’ve never seen a pumpkin shortbread cookie. There’s a good reason for that.

Pumpkin contains too much water to make anything except those nice, soft pumpkin cookies you see everywhere. Pumpkin butter, though, requires boiling most of the water content away. Which makes pumpkin butter perfect for crunchy shortbread cookies.

I didn’t come up with this recipe on my own, though. Actually, I found that pumpkin butter recipe when I was looking into how I should go about making pumpkin shortbread. There was only one blogger who had done it successfully–I Bake He Shoots.

Pumpkin Shortbread Cookies

• 1/2 cup butter, browned
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 1/8 cup flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup pumpkin butter
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 2 tsps pumpkin pie spice

What is browned butter? Well, butter has a good amount of liquid in it, as well. For this recipe, we reduce that liquid by browning the butter. Basically, you put it in a small pan and boil it until it turns a golden brown color. This took me about 5-10 minutes…and you’ll know the color when you see it. Trust me.

As for the pumpkin butter, I would recommend using the homemade version linked above if you want this recipe to work. If you use storebought, boil the extra liquid out of it first. Even then, the ingredients they used might be different from the ingredients used in the homemade version. Which means the recipe still might not come out right.

I LOVE this recipe. It was so much fun to make. The beauty of shortbread is that it doesn’t rise when it bakes, so the shape you cut it into will be the shape it comes out as. Shortbread makes beautiful cookies. I can’t wait to try more recipes like this!

You can view the rest of the recipe here!

I only had a couple of these cookies and then sent them to work with Zach (so I wouldn’t be tempted). He was supposed to share them with his co-workers…but apparently, they were too good for sharing, because he wound up hiding them in his desk and keeping them to himself. 😛

I know it’s odd that I spent the first two posts promoting I Bake He Shoots, but I’m loving their blog right now. Friday’s post will be more original, I promise. 😉

Have you ever tried making shortbread? Do you have any go-to pumpkin recipes? Let me know in the comments!

Also, what do you think about my new color scheme? I want to go with a darker red, but I’ll have to dive into the CSS for that. I like all the white, though. It makes my pictures pop!

This post was featured on Fabulous Finds.

[yumprint-recipe id=’124′]