The Best Vegan Pumpkin Spice Sugar Cookies Recipe for Fall: Soft, Chewy & Irresistible

Late August in the Midwest means the weather is either crisp and teasing of fall or 90 degrees with sweat dripping down your back. With school back in session, we are savoring the last moments of summer through bike rides, water fights, and as much time outside as possible. (We have to log as many hours for the 1,000 Hours Outside challenge as we can!)

And yet, I hear my sweaters calling to me from storage, ready to come out and enjoy all things apple and pumpkin—the coziness and hygge of what's to come.

My kids have been talking about Christmas a lot lately (lol, I know, I know—“enjoy the season you’re in”). They want to decorate cookies and the house, watch Christmas movies, and indulge in all the fun traditions we’ve started. I’m proud that we’ve created traditions our kids look forward to around the holidays.

With all their excitement about what's to come, we've been thinking about late summer and early fall traditions we want to start. Cue the best vegan pumpkin spice sugar cookies of your life. They're not too sweet and incredibly soft. Frost or glaze them—or don't. Six cookies didn’t last more than five minutes out of the oven before they disappeared from our counter.

I want to emphasize that these cookies aren't the kind of sugar cookies that make you feel like a dentist visit is in your future. They're just sweet enough - especially if you don't add any frosting or glaze. We will likely add a simple glaze, and have plans to decorate more in the future - after our new food coloring without bad dyes is delivered! Pro Tip: Save the extra canned pumpkin to make my pumpkin granola (coming to the blog soon!).

Load up on your supplies, throw on Gilmore Girls, and join me in what I hope becomes a part of your fall traditions. Make our Dough Step One: Get our your stand mixer and throw in your vegan butter, pumpkin, and sugar. Beat for about 2-3 minutes. It will be light and fluffy.

Step Two: Add in your plant milk, cornstarch, pumpkin spice, and almond extract. Beat for about 1 minute. Step Three: Add in one cup of flour, sprinkle baking powder and salt on top of the flour. And 1.5 cups more of flour on top. Mix flour until just combined. It should feel like play-doh, not too wet. If the dough is too wet, slowly add a few table spoons of flour at a time.

Step Four: Scoop the dough out and divide the dough into two balls. Step Five: Lay out parchment paper that will fit in a large cooking sheet. Put down your first ball of down and roll it out flat. I think my dough was roughly 1/8 inch. Transfer the parchment paper with flat cookie dough to the cooking sheet. Step Six: Lay out another sheet of parchment paper and repeat step five, rolling out your second ball of dough. When it's flat, lay the parchment paper with flattened dough on of the other sheet. Cover the exposed cookie dough with a sheet of parchment paper and tuck it all over it. Step Seven: Freeze your cookie dough on the cookie sheet for at least an hour. I typically freeze mine overnight so I can break up the steps of making cookies. We need the dough to stay really cold throughout this process so it keeps it shape after we stamp it out with cookie cutters.

Step Eight: Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees.

Step Nine: Take your top parchment paper/cookie dough out of the freezer (leave the other one in there). Stamp out your shapes with desired (fall) cookie cutters. Try to touch the dough as little as possible and go as quickly as you can to keep the dough cold. Like with standard cookie dough, you'll want to take the scraps after making your shapes and roll it into a ball and roll it out to make more cookies (likely a few times).

Step Ten: Add your stamped cookies to a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Bake the cookies for 7-9 minutes. The colder the dough is, the closer to 9 minutes you'll be. If you're popping cookies in that have been combined and rolled out a few times, they'll likely be closer to 7 minutes. Step Eleven: Repeat this process (taking freezer dough out when you get there), until you have your desired number of cookies. With the cutters we used, I had close to 50 cookies.

TIPS: I let the cookies cool on the sheet for a few minutes after they're out of the oven, then I transfer them to a cooling rack. Make sure the cookies are completely cool before decorating or storing.

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