Chai Spiced Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

It's election day in America.  I wanted to avoid the crowd so I work up early and arrived at the polls by 6:30 am.  I then preceded to wait in line for an hour.  

I'm grateful for the opportunity and privilege to vote.  I'm also really excited the election season is over.  

I'm going to tune into the election results, but I'm not going to stay up late to wait for the poll in California to close.  I have some friends who are going to stay up until the wee hours of the morning, but I'm not that committed.

These cookies were my first foray into fall baking this year.  I had this ingenious idea to make them trendy by adding chai spices.  Unfortunately, I was a little light handed with the spices, and I had a hard time discerning them.

Pumpkin is a squash native to North America.  It's packed full of beta-carotene and and Vitamin A.  Every year 1.5 billion tons of pumpkins are produced in the United States.

I found a pumpkin cookie recipe on allrecipes.com.  I replaced some of the white sugar with brown sugar, used pecans instead of walnuts, and added chai spices.

The ingredients were 1 cup canned pumpkin, 1/2 cup white sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup vegetable oil, 1 egg, 2 cups all-purpose flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 tablespoon vanilla extract, 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips, 1/2 cup chopped pecans, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon cardamom, 1/2 teaspoon cloves, 1/4 teaspoon ground coriander, and 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger.

I combined the pumpkin, sugars, vegetable oil and egg together.  

I stirred in the flour, baking powder, ground cinnamon, ground cardamom, ground cloves, ground coriander, ground ginger, salt, baking soda, and vanilla.  I stirred until the batter was just combined.

I mixed in the pecans and chocolate chunks.

I scoped mounds of dough onto baking sheets about two inches apart.  I baked the cookies for 10 to 11 minutes at 350 degrees.

I let the cookies cool a little on the pan before removing them to a wire rack.

Pumpkin cookies are one of my favorite if not my very favorite cookies.  They are so tender and chewy.

These were dense and moist.

The pumpkin flavor was pronounced.  I could taste the subtle spices, but I would have preferred a stronger chai spice taste.  It's a delicate balance because you don't want to overpower people either.

The chocolate and pecans added some texture and crunch.  The flavors were very autumnal.  

These were toothsome, homey, and pleasurable.