This pumpkin cookie dip is vegan, gluten-free, and Megan-simple

Cookies, jealous of the ascendancy of the cupcake, have found a way to up their fabulosity: the cookie dip. This cookie dip is vegan, gluten-free, Megan-simple, and — by far most important — flavored like pumpkin pie. So: cookies dipped in pie.

Ordinarily, I listen to music while cooking, and ordinarily I’d consider that anything pumpkin-colored to be a shoo-in for Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange. But this recipe goes so fast that you’ll get maybe three tracks into an album, so you should probably queue up a single instead. Monster Mash, maybe?

Ingredients:

• 1 can of chickpeas, a.k.a. garbanzo beans
• 1/3 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk (or 1/3 cup unsweetened plain almond milk plus 1/4 teaspoon vanilla)
• 1/3 cup maple syrup (plus two teaspoons)
• 3/4 cup pumpkin purée, canned or fresh (plus 1 tablespoon)
• 1 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice (plus a shake)
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon (plus 1/2 teaspoon)

Instructions:

Open the can of chickpeas, pour the chickpeas into a colander, and rinse them under running water until they stop being slimy and become perky little pale pink peas. Shake to drain, and pick out any loose skins. Dump the drained chickpeas into your food processor.

(Even non-cooks need a mini-food processor. These puppies cost about $20 at your local grocery store or drugstore. They make pesto. They mix small quantities of dough. They guarantee that you will never again have to chop an onion if you don’t want to. Get one, and before you know it, you’ll be making carrot-raisin salad and apple muffins for the sheer joy of shredding all of the things.)

To the chickpeas, add the vanilla almond milk (or the un-vanilla almond milk and the vanilla). Pulse for 20 seconds. If the result is more clump than pulp, keep pulsing until you can shout hooray for a purée. (Or “olé!” for purée.)

Scrape down the sides of the food processor with a spatula and add the initial portions of the rest of the ingredients (the amounts not in parentheses). If you don’t have pumpkin pie spice, you can substitute menacing shakes of nutmeg, ginger, allspice, cloves, coriander, and whatever else along those lines you have handy. But if you’re not a frequent cook, you need to own pumpkin pie spice. It pinch-hits in any situation where a mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves is used, and it saves you filling your cupboard with spices that’ll turn to dust before you use them. I used pumpkin pie spice in everything baked that wasn’t chocolate for years before I bought actual nutmeg.

Pulse, pulse, pulse! My little food processor that could had some moments of implying that it couldn’t, but I pulsed, scraped, stirred a little, pulsed some more, and fairly quickly got myself an evenly blended purée. Hooray for purée!

Taste and adjust the blend with the extra quantities of the ingredients, as you see fit. Pulse a little more. Pulse a little, stir a little, pulse a little, stir a little!

Serve with ginger cookies. The cookies here are store-bought from the gluten-free aisle because I’m counting on the dip to do the work of impressing. Purées always say “I tried harder.”

Should you be wondering what to do with the leftover half-can of pumpkin, I’d vote for making a second batch of this cookie dip. It tastes like pumpkin pie, so you can now dip your cookies in pumpkin pie without people looking at you funny.