recipe

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’ve never been sure about publishing recipes, I mean, who holds the rights? But since people keep saying to me “Hey dummy! You can’t copyright/trademark a recipe!” I’ve decided to start publishing them…

Here’s my recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup canned pumpkin
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 (6 ounce) package chocolate chips

Directions

Preheat oven to 350-degrees F.
Grease baking sheets with canola spray.
In a large mixing bowl cream 1/2 cup butter with sugar until fluffy. Stir in pumpkin, egg and vanilla.
Sift dry ingredients together (flour through salt) in a bowl.
Add dry ingredients to butter mixture, stirring well to combine.
Stir in chocolate chips.
Drop batter by spoonfuls on to baking sheets.
Bake for 12-15 minutes or until browned.
Cool on rack.

These cookies do not flatten out like normal chocolate chip cookies. They stay sort of puffy. They’re almost like a cross between a cookie and a muffin. A cuffin? A mookie? I don’t know… I find them delicious though.

It should go without saying that you should use raw sugar (not processed!) and unbleached flour (not “enriched” or bleached!) and any other more natural/organic materials you can find. But it doesn’t. So I’m saying it.

Enjoy!

This is a subject I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time, and Meg touched on it recently: Can a Recipe Be Stolen?

I like making things in the kitchen, mainly food, and a lot of times I use sites like Recipe*zaar, where it’s common to see people add comments like "I got this recipe from" followed by some food show, or cookbook, or box of whatever. Now, this is something I wouldn’t do, but then again, I’m a Creative Commons geek, and I believe in the rights of the creators, and wouldn’t just take someone else’s work and republish it (to a world-wide audience) without making sure it’s ok to do. (This view probably represents 0.0001% of the people who use sites like this.)

I make my own pizza crusts, and the recipe I use is from some magazine I can’t remember… I ripped out the page about 4 years ago, and eventually added it into my home wiki (where I keep many of my recipes) for use when I need it. I won’t publish it, because I’m sure I don’t have the rights to do so. It may be like 100 other pizza crusts recipes, but still, I didn’t create it.

I don’t have any answers to this problem, other than everyone adopting Creative Commons licenses, but even those have their own set of problems…