Pumpkin seems to show up in everything in the fall, from lattes to cakes to cookie mixes. This Pumpkin Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookie Mix from Trader Joe’s is one of the store’s new product offerings for the season. Naturally, as a fan of almost all things with pumpkin and pumpkin pie spice, I had to give it a try.

The cookie mix is very straightforward to put together, simply add an egg, a softened 1/2 cup of butter and 2 tablespoons of water to the mix and stir until well-combined. I used a hand mixer, however you probably could to it by hand with a bit of muscle, too. The mix uses the same ingredients that you would find in a homemade cookie mix – sugar, chocolate chips, oats, unbleached flour, brown sugar, salt, and spices – but it seems to utilize dried pumpkin, since you can’t put canned pumpkin into a packaged cookie mix. The mix has a nice mix of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and cloves in it.

The mix yields 24 good-sized cookies, just as it promises on the box. I used an average sized cookie scoop to portion mine out. The cookies baked up evenly and smelled like pumpkin spice when they came out of the oven. They were chewy, but not too dense, and had a nice balance of pumpkin, spices and chocolate. They weren’t quite as buttery as homemade oatmeal cookies, nor were they quite as moist as cookies made with canned pumpkin, but they were still pretty tasty and did feel more homemade than most pumpkin cookie mixes I’ve tried. My only small complaint was the the cookies didn’t spread that much, so next time I would flatten them slightly before baking to give them a less domed appearance.

I also have to say that I really like the packaging for this cookie mix. The round shape seems to be a nod to the round packaging that a classic oatmeal brand (Quaker) uses, tying in nicely with the oatmeal in the mix. Aside from the oatmeal connection, it just has a great feel to it and I think it stands out from other packages. I filled it up with a few cookies after baking and used it to transport some treats to a friend, which gave it a touch of versatility, too.

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