Soft, chewy, and delicious, these healthy pumpkin cookies are packed with cinnamon, oats, and chocolate chips. Just try to stop at one… they’re so good, it’s impossible!
The best healthy pumpkin cookies
With hearty oatmeal and sweet cinnamon goodness, these wholesome pumpkin chocolate chip cookies are the perfect way to recharge.
The addition of pumpkin not only lowers the fat and calorie content, it also gives an irresistible Fall flavor twist to traditional chocolate chip cookies.
These healthy pumpkin cookies can be completely dairy free, egg free, vegan, gluten free, refined sugar free, and oil free.
Also try these Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies
Oatmeal
Pumpkin
Vanilla
Cinnamon
Chocolate Chips
With pumpkin, oatmeal, and chocolate all stuffed into one epic cookie, how could it not be love at first bite?
Healthy pumpkin cookie ingredients
The pumpkin: This can be canned pumpkin puree or fresh roasted pumpkin. It is also okay to substitute an equal amount of canned or cooked sweet potato puree.
The oatmeal: Quick oats or rolled oats work, as do quinoa flakes or spelt flakes. I do not recommend trying to substitute steel cut oats here.
Chocolate chips: Use your favorite regular size or mini chocolate chips. I like dark chocolate chips, but semi sweet or even white chocolate chips are fine.
Vanilla extract: Be sure to buy pure vanilla extract, not imitation or vanilla flavor. If you prefer to use vanilla bean paste, this is fine.
The fat source: Almond butter or cashew butter are my personal preferences for these healthy cookies. Regular butter (including plant based brands) also works.
Oat flour: Most regular grocery stores and health food stores should carry packaged oat flour. Or make your own by pulsing oats in a blender until they turn to flour.
The sweetener: I like raw cane sugar or coconut sugar. Date sugar, white sugar, or brown sugar work as well. Use granulated erythritol for sugar free pumpkin cookies.
How to make vegan pumpkin oatmeal cookies
If you’ll be baking the cookies, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Combine all dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl, and stir well.
Soften the nut butter until it is easily stirrable, then add all remaining ingredients to the mixing bowl and stir to form a cookie dough batter.
Shape the cookie dough into balls with your hands or a cookie scoop. For no bake pumpkin cookies, simply refrigerate until firm. Or continue reading for baked cookies.
Place on a baking tray and flatten into cookie shapes by pressing down with a spoon. Bake on the oven’s center rack for ten minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool an additional ten minutes before handling, during which time the cookies will firm up.
Store leftover pumpkin cookies in a covered container in the refrigerator due to the perishable ingredients.
Alternative options include making the cookie dough the night before or freezing cookie dough balls for a rainy day.
Above, watch the healthy pumpkin cookie recipe video
I’ve made these pumpkin oatmeal cookies at least a dozen times now. Most recently, I brought a double batch to a Halloween party.
Every year, I get very into Halloween baking, dreaming up creative costumes… and of course eating Halloween candy (always chocolate candy for me).
Costumes over previous years have included a sand witch, a Katie bug, Cookie Monster’s girlfriend, the bride of Frankenstein, a 5’3 giraffe, and a monster chef.
Or there was the time I found a five dollar tiger headband at Party City two days before Halloween and brainstormed tiger puns. My favorites were Tiger Woodstock (tiger ears with a hippie costume) and Jungle Gym (tiger ears plus gym clothes). In the end, I went with the jungle gym. The best part was getting to wear sneakers all night.
Last year’s holiday costume was even easier: buy a cat headband at Target, dress all in black, carry a camera, and repeat everything others say. Photocopy Cat.
Last year, I also made Pumpkin Dip and Pumpkin Cheesecake Bars.
Baked or no bake cookies
This year, after discovering that the one can of Libby’s pumpkin I’d placed in my kitchen cabinet had somehow multiplied into six cans, I decided to use some of that pumpkin up by turning my chocolate no bake cookie recipe into no bake pumpkin cookies instead.
My initial plan had been to bake the pumpkin cookies. But obviously I had to taste the dough as I went along, and it turns out these pumpkin cookies are just as good unbaked. So if you live in a warm climate or simply don’t feel like turning on your oven, feel free to skip the cooking step!
The healthy pumpkin cookies were a big hit at the party, and I’ve since made them three more times for myself.
Yay – now only four cans of pumpkin to use up!
Probably should go buy some more canned pumpkin…
Healthy Pumpkin Cookies
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup quick oats (for grain-free, try these Keto Cookies)
- 1/2 cup oat flour
- 1/4 cup sugar, unrefined or erythritol if desired
- 3-5 tbsp mini chocolate chips
- 1/4 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp pumpkin pie spice, or additional cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/3 cup canned pumpkin, or mashed sweet potato
- 1/3 cup almond butter, or regular butter spread
- 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
InstructionsÂ
- *The cookies can be baked or no-bake – it's your choice!If baking, preheat oven to 350 F. Combine all dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Add wet ingredients (soften nut butter to a stir-able consistency first if needed), and stir to form a batter. (Watch the step-by-step video above if you're a visual person like I am.) Form balls, then place on a cookie tray and flatten a little. Either refrigerate until firm, or bake 10 minutes, then let cool an additional 10 minutes, during which time they will firm up. You could also make up the dough balls ahead of time and freeze them for a rainy day!View Nutrition Facts
Video
Notes
More Healthy Cookie Options
Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies
How does one get the recipe on line for the Pumpkin Chocolate Oatmeal cookie
Hi, not sure what you mean, it’s right here in this post… is it not showing up for you? If so, can you try refreshing the page and let me know if that works? It’s showing for me 🙂
Jason
How did you know I was going to make something with pumpkin tonight? What a perfect surprise and coincidence in my email today for this recipe, so I had to try them instead of the muffins I was initially planning, and these were AWESOME little pumpkin chocolate yummy bites! I did try them both ways, baked and unbaked, and both are good but I love the baked cookies better! I used almond butter and 5 Tbsp of chocolate chips because, well, chocolate of course! Thanks for the great cookie recipe, Katie!
Okay, it’s been a long Monday, but in your video it appears almond milk or some type of milk was added?
Hi, sorry for the confusion! You are absolutely correct, and we completely forgot about that. Katie made the recipe multiple times before publishing it, and she’d ended up changing/improving it from the version of the recipe when the video was done. The older version works too; Katie just found that the cookies have a much better texture with more almond butter instead of adding milk. This was her original version:
3/4 cup quick oats (60g)
1/2 cup oat flour – or you can finely blend oats until they turn into flour, then measure out 1/2 cup of the finely blended oats (70g)
1/4 cup sugar of choice
3 tbsp mini chocolate chips
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/3 cup canned pumpkin (80g)
1-2 tbsp milk of choice, as needed (I used 2)
1 1/2 tbsp oil or nut butter of choice
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
Once again, sorry for the confusion, and thanks for noticing when we hadn’t. Apparently it was a long Monday for us too!
Jason (media relations)
Hey! How many cookies does the recipe yield?
I LOVE the regular chocolate chip version of these cookies, and can’t wait to try this one!
The nutrition facts say 12, and that’s about the size of the ones in the picture. Or you can do smaller ones and get something like 16 🙂
I would love to try the Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies, but I don’t have oat flour and I’m pretty rural…can I sub white flour? (Or almond or coconut – those are the ones I’ve accumulated so far!)
Hmm, we haven’t tried other flours. The taste might not be quite as sweet if you use white flour, so taste the dough to decide. Texture-wise it should be fine!
Jason (media relations)
just grind up your oats, that’s how oat flour is made
I used almond flour and they came out great!
It is so simple to make oat flour!!! Just put some oats in the food processor and run about 20 to 30 seconds! Oat flour!😃👌
Just made these and Oh my! They are fabulous! Pretty sure I am going to let my kids eat them for breakfast in the morning… I might as well :). Thanks Katie for yet another favorite!
I made these as an energy ball! I just substituted the sugar for 2 tbsp honey and omitted the baking soda. Super yummy–the little ones love them too!
These were amazing and gone in 24 hours haha! I subbed almond flour for oat flour (because I wanted to use some up that I had on hand) and subbed PB for almond butter cause that’s what I had. They were SO good, so easy and I’ll probably make more tonight with the extra pumpkin!! Oh and I added more chocolate chips because why not! =) Thank you for all of your recipes – they are helping me transition my husband into eating more plant based!
so yummy! I tripled this recipe and baked it into a 9×13, so it was like breakfast bars. i used a mix of ground oats and almond meal, and a higher ratio of pumpkin than almond butter bc we’re all about the pumpkin in my house! baked 25ish mins and it was an amazing thing to have in the morning! thanks Katie!
Your idea sounds amazing!
I subbed peanut butter for almond butter because the almond butter is too ridiculously expensive and I’m trying to gain weight anyways; added a bunch of chia and flax seed bc wooo health! I also subbed half of the oat flour for vanilla protein powder. Now, I wasn’t sure if I could still bake this recipe if I’m using peanut butter but the cookies are currently in the oven so I guess we’ll see if they melt together to form a chocolate chip peanut butter soup. Wish me luck and thank you for your fabulous healthy recipes you beautiful chocolate wizard!
Ps they came out marvelous and solid – no soup tonight 😄
Thank you so much for making them 🙂
Flax seeds must be ground to get the nutritional benefits.