Fat Jack O’Lantern is one of my favorite cookies we make. When I discovered the trick to making a chewy pumpkin cookie, I was elated. I love pumpkin and I love fall in New England. So, for us to be able to put out something that really shows off fall in New England was important to me. Also, I feel like the more I can use this pic of CDO Brady in a pumpkin costume, the better I feel about the 3 minutes of torture he faced 2 years ago. He's still mad at me and Megan.
The trick to making pumpkin cookies that are chewy and not as cakey is to sub out eggs for pumpkin, then it’s all treats from there. We make a delicious pumpkin cookie base, in this case we infuse Sam Adams Fat Jack beer (I squirreled some away from last year) and we accent it with some pumpkin pie spice and milk chocolate chips. Next year, we might have a new version or spin on this cookie, we’ll have to see.
Soon after Top Shelf Cookies launched, I remember telling people one morning that I was going to go home from my part time job and take a nap and watch a movie – I was tired from all the excitement and paperwork from launching. That was the first day that my day as the owner of Top Shelf Cookies didn’t go according to plan (spoiler alert – it would not be the last either) I got a phone call asking if I could make 200 pumpkin cookies for an event at Sam Adams brewery in 2 days. Ideally with pumpkin beer. I didn’t have a recipe and I hadn’t scaled up to 200 cookies yet, but I said yes. Later that night, I had three versions of the cookie sitting on my kitchen counter. I picked one and decided to go for it the next day.
I went to CWK and I started in on the bake. There was a store buyer visiting the kitchen that day and he wanted to talk to me, but I couldn’t chat so much, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to pull this off. I pulled off the bake and it was perfect. Brought the cookies to the brewery the next evening and realized that I could put together recipes on the fly more than I expected of myself.
Since then, we’ve always offered a pumpkin beer cookie during the fall. But, Fat jack O’Lantern is my favorite of them all. The beer is barrel aged and just has a really good pumpkin flavor and I think it translates well to the cookie.
I hope all of our CoTM subscribers enjoy this cookie and I hope that if you've been on the fence about gifting CoTM to someone (or yourself) that you might give this one a try!
Till next month, with gratitude -
Heather