Persimmon cookies

My mom really loves persimmons.  She loves them so much that a few years back she planted her own persimmon tree.  Unfortunately, she planted the wrong kind.  There are two main types of persimmons: astringent and non-astringent.  The most common astringent kind that I've seen at supermarkets is Hachiya.  The most common type of non-astringent I've seen available for purchase is Fuyu. 

The Hachiya (one of the right) has a long shape.  They are not supposed to be eaten until they turn soft.  The Fuyu (one on the left) looks like a tomato and is much flatter in shape.  These can be eaten while still hard and crunchy.  My family enjoys the Fuyu ones, but my mom accidentally planted a Hachiya tree.  As a result, every year her large persimmon tree bears a lot of Hachiya persimmons.  And the only person who will eat them is my mom.

Last year, I decided to help reduce the amount of persimmons that were rotting away, and looked up some persimmon recipes.  I made a delicious persimmon bread last year, and again this year, which I will be sharing with you shortly.  When browsing through recipes, I also found a persimmon cookies recipe that looked interesting, and decided to try them out. 

One thing I noticed when I was baking, was how similar persimmons are to pumpkins. They both share the lovely orange color, and the persimmon recipes are a lot like the pumpkin recipes I've been finding.

The cookies ended up looking and tasting a bit like the pumpkin chocolate chip cookies I made, sans the chocolate chips.  I thought that was interesting since persimmons and pumpkins don't really taste alike in my opinion.  When I gave some to Baby Bro, he was super surprised to learn he was eating a persimmon cookie and not a pumpkin cookie.

The recipe was easy enough to prepare.  A few problems I had was that the dough is really hard to work with.  It's so liquidy, it looked like something that needed to be poured into a pan and baked.  The fact the dough was so liquidy made it almost impossible to shape.  So my end result cookies were not as pretty as I would have liked.

Persimmon Cookies adapted from allrecipes

Ingredients

• 2 ripe persimmons, pureed (approximately one cup)
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 egg
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Lightly grease or line one baking sheet with parchment paper or foil.
2. Combine the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and salt.

3. Cream the butter or margarine with the sugar. Beat in the egg and persimmons.
4. Add the flour mixture and mix until combined, stir in the chopped nuts. Drop by tablespoonfuls, 2 inches apart, onto the prepared baking sheet.  Try to flatten the dough and shape it to make it round and flat.
   
5. Bake at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for  about 10 minutes.