Pumpkin Protein Cookies

Made with pumpkin puree, whey protein and coconut flour, these pumpkin protein cookies are delicious, nutritious and filling! They are gluten-free, egg-free, nut-free, grain-free and keto-friendly!

They are sweet and warmly spiced, and soft like muffin top cookies. This healthy protein cookie recipe is so easy and simple: you just need one bowl and one spoon to prepare!

If you’d like to see more of these Fall-inspired pumpkin and protein powder recipes, check out my Mini Pumpkin Pies and Mini Bundt Cakes (a reader favorite!)

• Pumpkin puree, ⅓ cup (canned or homemade)
• Melted butter (or coconut oil), 3 tablespoons
• Coconut flour, ⅓ cup
• Unflavored whey protein powder, 1 scoop (30 g)
• Sugar substitute, ⅓ cup
• ½ tsp baking powder and ¼ tsp baking soda for leavening
• Vanilla extract, cinnamon and ginger powder, and freshly ground nutmeg for the warm and comforting Fall flavor!

As you can see this is a cookie recipe without eggs. With the pumpkin puree, there’s more than enough moisture so eggs aren’t needed.

There’s a printable version of the recipe at the bottom of this post where you can automatically scale the recipe and see the metric measurements as well.

Ingredient notes and substitutions

Keto and gluten-free flours: I use a combination of coconut flour and low-carb, unflavored whey protein isolate for the perfect soft keto cookie texture.

Sweetener choices: I made this recipe with my homemade erythritol stevia blend and I got perfectly sweet cookies! You can use any keto sweetener that measures 1:1 to sugar, though: Swerve, Lakanto, PureCane.

Pure erythritol or (my new favorite) allulose are about 30% less sweet than you can 1:1 sweetener blends, so you can increase the amount of sweetener by 30% if using them for these protein pumpkin cookies recipe.

Warm spices: I suggest ground cinnamon, ginger powder (you can leave it out if you don’t love spicy cookies) and freshly grated nutmeg for the best flavor.

You can totally substitute the separate spices for pumpkin pie spice mix if you don’t have them available.

How to make

This protein pumpkin cookie dough is very easy to mix and gets ready in a matter of minutes, so start pre-heating the oven right away to 180 °C (355 °F), and line your cookie baking sheet with parchment or wax paper.

1. Melt the butter: You want the butter just warm enough to be to be fully melted, not too hot.
2. Mix the butter with the keto sweetener, then add the vanilla extract and pumpkin puree. Mix it well.
3. Next, add the dry ingredients: coconut flour, unflavored whey protein, and the spices. Mix everything up, until you get a crumbly and soft pumpkin cookie dough.
4. The dough is soft and not sticky, so you can simply shape it with your hands. Divide the batter in two, then four. Make 4 balls of cookie dough from each quarter, for a total of 16. Transfer them to the prepared baking sheet, and slightly flatten them as the cookies won’t spread during baking.
5. Bake the pumpkin protein cookies for about 15 minutes at 180 °C (355 °F) until they are golden with cracked tops.

I know this is gonna be hard now, because your kitchen smells like being wrapped in a blanket, sipping hot tea at the porch in a late autumn afternoon, with a cat purring in your lap. But try and wait for the keto pumpkin cookies to cool down completely before enjoying 😉

Hot tips and tricks

One bowl for everything

To make the least amount of mess, I like to make this protein cookie recipe in one bowl only. Instead of melting the butter in a separate bowl, I melt the butter in the microwave in a large heat-resistant bowl, and add all the other ingredients on top of the melted butter.

There’s no need to bring the butter to room temperature. Simply breaking up the cold butter in pieces before melting helps the process go faster without creating areas of hot butter amidst un-melted pieces.

Make pumpkin puree thicker

This step is not absolutely necessary, but I like to blot away the excess moisture of the pumpkin puree to make it thicker. It helps get a nicer, richer dough that makes the best cookies.

This baking tip applies to either homemade pumpkin puree or pure canned pumpkin, which can be also be a bit soupy sometimes.

Create a pumpkin blotting pad by folding some paper towels (or a clean cloth) at the bottom of a bowl, or at the bottom of a sieve placed over the rim of a larger bowl, for better drainage.

Spoon the pumpkin puree onto the paper / cloth. The excess liquid will slowly be absorbed into it, which will get you a thicker pumpkin puree.

The time it takes varies, but if you want to prepare it on the day before making the protein cookies to be sure that most water has been drained away you can leave the pumpkin puree blotting in the fridge over night.

Use pumpkin leftovers

One full recipe of these pumpkin protein keto cookies calls for just 1/3 cup of pumpkin puree, so they are perfect for when have extra pumpkin leftover from an opened can.

It’s fall season and you have plenty of pumpkin to use up? You can try my recipe for baby bundt pumpkin cakes (with whey protein topping) which uses 3/4 cup of pumpkin puree, or make this 5-minute pumpkin and coconut soup, which takes a whole can!

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