I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a difficult confession.
I am not a fan of pumpkin.
I know.  I know.  I should be a fan of pumpkin.  It's absolutely unseasonal of me.  But seriously though, am I the only person who feels almost overwhelmed and definitely inundated with pumpkin recipes.  They are everywhere and everything.  Every time I check pinterest it feels like half of the recipes jumping out at me are pumpkin something or other.  Every cooking/baking blog is chock full of pumpkin this and that.  From bread to brownies, it's pumpkin coming at me.  There is literally a pumpkin version of just about everything.  I'm waiting for pumpkin toothpaste to make an appearance.  What am I thinking, it's probably already out there.
I haven't ever analyzed why I'm not a fan of pumpkin so much.  It's not necessarily unappealing to me I guess.  I absolutely don't crave it however.  Other than pumpkin pie I can't remember anything being made with pumpkin when I was a kid.  I guess you just didn't do it.  There was no Pinterest to give us all of these crazy pumpkin recipes after all.  We just ate oreo's and cheezeez instead.  And lots and lots of chocolate chip cookies.  Not pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.  It doesn't smell like a sweet dessert thing to me either.  When I cook pumpkin (almost never) I don't immediate think 'cake' when I look at it mashed or smell it.  How it ever made it's way into a bowl of sugar and got dumped into a pie crust I'll never know.  Having said all of that, I may well chow down on a slice of pumpkin bread if someone offered it to me and a pumpkin muffin might go nicely with a morning coffee.  But so would a lot of other things.
While I'm not out there dumping pumpkin into my latte's (or any other flavoured-with-anything-other-than-coffee coffee for that matter), I do use a lot of fruit and whatever in my baking... when I bake.  Let's be clear, unless it contains chocolate in some clearly visible form it won't get eaten.  Yes, there are lots of things that get made in our kitchen but not eaten (at least in their entirety).  Recently, Kid #2 begged that I make some cookies, 'and not the healthy kind' he added.  By healthy he means with anything other than chocolate, white flour or chocolate chips.  After 7 months, give or take, of almost no baking and definitely precious little of the chocolate-chocolate chip-white flour variety, I decided that everybody was likely due a little treat.  These cookies are me obliging the request.  Kid #2 shared a few cookies with a friend from school who came over for a play date.  He told his friend that they were the best cookies in the world... and they are already gone.


Eaten.
Done.


No pumpkin added.


Chocolate Decadence Cookies adapted from 'Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy' Alice Medrich