Fall Cookie Cups - Snickerdoodles & Pumpkin Cream Cheese Icing

Hope you had a Happy Halloween with your friends and family! The weather was nasty here, so the city postponed the official trick-or-treating to this evening. I hope we get some trick-or-treaters! I've never been a huge fan of Halloween (I hate getting scared), but this is our first time we have lived somewhere that might get kids coming by. We even carved a pumpkin this year, I love how it turned out!

Nothing spooky here - my happy monkey pumpkin!

To celebrate Halloween, I baked a special treat for my husband and I to take to our workplaces. I wasn't sure what I wanted to make, but I knew it needed to have pumpkin in it somehow. I decided I wanted to think outside of the box and not going down the cupcake/cake path. It dawned on me that Snickerdoodle cookies would be pretty great paired with pumpkin cream. The more I thought about it, a sweet pumpkin cream cheese icing and Snickerdoodle cookies sounded like the perfect combination. Instead of making cookie sandwiches, or iced cookies, I went with cookie cups. I think the mini cups, filled with icing, look so adorable and are easy to eat. It's very similar (in style) to my fruit cream cheese cookie cups I made last summer.

I searched around online and discovered I was sadly not the first person to come up with this idea (isn't that always the case?). So I decided to just use a slightly altered version of the cream cheese icing I found from The Crunchy Mamacita's blog. This icing is packed with fall flavors - pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. What more could you want in a Fall treat?! I was pressed for time that night, so I actually used store bought cookie dough (shhhh!) for the cookie cups. The Snickerdoodle cookie dough was delicious, but I want to try it sometime with a homemade recipe.

These cookie cups were quite the hit at our workplaces! I'm going to make them for our family Thanksgiving meals this month. If you are even the slightest pumpkin fan, you will want to try this recipe! Feel free to share with friends, or on social media! My recipe makes 48 cups, but can easily be cut it in half for one batch of cookies.

By the way, if you want to learn a great way to make your own pumpkin puree, check out my post from earlier this week.

Snickerdoodle Cookie Cups w/ Pumpkin Cream Cheese Icing ingredients (yields 48 mini cups):

• Dough for 48 Snickerdoodle cookies (~walnut size balls of dough)
• 1/3 cup pumpkin
• 4 oz cream cheese
• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp ground cloves

Snickerdoodle Cookie Cups w/ Pumpkin Cream Cheese Icing directions:

• Preheat oven to 350F
• Spray mini muffin tin with cooking spray
• Place one ball of walnut sized dough in each spot, press down slightly in the middle to get it to spread out
• Bake 8-10 mins
• Use the backside of a teaspoon to make an indentation in each cookie, this will give you room for the icing

• Allow cookies to cool for around 5 minutes, and then take them out of sheet, cool on rack
• Beat together pumpkin and cream cheese until smooth
• Mix in spices
• Slowly add powdered sugar, around 1 cup at a time
• Pipe icing on completely cooled cookies using a piping bag and the 1M tip (used for piping cupcakes)
• Enjoy!