Happy fall everyone! Fall is my absolute favorite time of the year. Back in Michigan it means cider mills and apple picking, fresh donuts, apple cider, and pumpkin. Being down in Memphis, this is the time of year I get desperately homesick. It’s still 90 degrees out and all the tress are green, but halloween is right around the corner and the kids have been in school for 2 months. It all feels wrong, which is why I started a tradition: Every year on the first day of fall I make pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, these pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.

There’s something comforting about this tradition. While everyone else starts pumpkin-ing things up on the first of September, I wait until it’s really fall, really maybe actually getting to cold. Plus, it at least gives me something to look forward to while I’m missing out on the smell of the cider mill popping popcorn and kids getting hay rides, and have i mentioned picking apples? Because Empire apples are pickable this weekend and I’m not there to pick them.

But at least I have these pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. They filled the house with the smell of cinnamon and the warmth of fall. They are melt in your mouth delicious and just get more delicious the more time goes by.

Every time I make these I think “these cookies are too wet and dense”, and then I eat one and remember why I haven’t changed the recipe. It’s because they’re delicious. And the wet and dense make them cake-y but also make it seem like they’re underdone. And we all know an underdone cookies is the best kind of cookie.

As with all my cookies, these are easy to make. Just one bowl. They take a total of 30 minutes from bowl to oven to cooling and then you can eat them all.

I know it’s hard to not eat them all right away, but I really do recommend stashing some in the fridge for 24 hours to let that pumpkin flavor become more pronounced. If you don’t that’s fine. I’d totally understand.

I told my boyfriend last night “you can eat this cookie”, pointing at one that had a dent in it because I wanted to have the rest to photograph. Then I ate three. I don’t think he was too pleased with me limiting him but not myself. Lucky for him though, he gets next day cookies. It was really selfless and out of love that I only gave him one.