It’s funny that about this time ten years ago, not soon after launching, I was still working part time in the lighting industry. But we’d been in operation for a few weeks now and I felt tired. So I promised myself I would go to my part time job, drop some stuff off at the kitchen on my way home and get my pajamas on and maybe just go to bed early. In fact, I put my pajamas on my couch to remind me when I got home that’s what I would be doing! At lunch I checked my messages and I had a message from someone at Sam Adams. They wanted to know if I could make a pumpkin beer chocolate chip cookie for an event next week, they would need 200. Of course I wanted the job and I knew it came from our friend Jennifer at Sam Adams. So, I spent the rest of the afternoon distracted at my part time job and ran out of there like my pants were on fire at 3PM. I drove from Southie to Dorchester in record time, dropped off my stuff at the kitchen and hit the grocery store and the liquor store on the way home. I burst into my apartment, right past my pajamas and ran into the kitchen to start creating a recipe on the fly.
I made a couple versions and found one I liked and went to bed at 11pm, a far cry from my planned 5pm pajama time.
The next day I went to the kitchen and our director was excited to see me. There was a buyer from a grocery store there that had our cookies and wanted to meet me. I quickly explained that I really needed to get to work on this order. The buyer followed me into the kitchen and kept talking to me, I couldn’t really hear him. It was probably a great opportunity, but this was an actual order from Sam Adams, and I just created this recipe and I was now going to try to scale it to make 200 cookies. Granted, I should have been preparing myself to do this kind of thing….but I didn’t know till I knew. I wasn’t making 200 cookies without a place to take them.
So I made it through, everything worked really well and the next day I was off to Sam Adams with a Harvest Ale Chocolate Chip cookie. The beer has changed over the years, but the recipe hasn’t really changed the structure much
I had learned quickly that to make a good pumpkin cookie, using the pumpkin as the binder, as opposed to eggs would give me a chewy cookie. Over the years there had been iterations with semi sweet chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and different beers. But, for years now it’s been Fat Jack O’Lantern and it’s a milk chocolate chip cookie and the pumpkin beer is Samuel Adams Jacko.
I have a little soft spot for this cookie because it was a test of what I could do on the fly.
I hope you enjoy October's Cookie of the Month as much as we enjoy making it.
Don’t Crumble -
Heather