Erin's Recipes for People Who Can't Cook: Pumpkin Cookies

This is a great recipe for fall, and also for the indecisive. The original recipe calls for 1 cup of pumpkin, but seriously? Pumpkin comes in two-cup cans. The solution seemed fairly obvious to me, and now I have 6 dozen cookies. Whatever. Guess the department will be receiving some bounty on Monday.

2 c. canned pumpkin (one 15 oz. can)
1 c. shortening
2 c. sugar
4 c. flour
3 capsful lemon juice (~3 tsp., I guess? The original recipe called for grated orange peel, which I did not have on hand, so I substituted a random amount of lemon juice until the batter tasted interesting, which...your mileage may vary)
2 tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
Raisins and/or chocolate chips (optional)

Frosting:
3 oz. cream cheese
1/3 c. butter
2 c. powdered sugar
1 tsp. vanilla

Heat oven to 375. Mix pumpkin, shortening, and sugar. Add remaining ingredients and mix. Decide batter needs nutmeg. Sprinkle some in until it looks right and mix. Divide batter three ways, leaving 1/3 plain, putting 6 oz. chocolate chips in 1/3, and the tail end of that box of raisins in the back of the cupboard in 1/3. Drop onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake 8-10 minutes (mine looked great at 8 exactly). Mix frosting ingredients, first with a spoon, then with the handheld thing your grandmother gave you last Christmas that is like, the second most useful thing ever for scaring the cats. Frost the cooled raisin and plain cookies, but not the chocolate chip ones, because that's just sugary death.