Pumpkin muffins made by two little pumpkins

Last weekend we took our girls to "Grandpa's" pumpkin patch down the street. It's your basic pumpkin patch/bouncy house/carnie-run affair.  Bunny had lost some privileges so she wasn't able to participate in the bounce action (maybe this weekend), but she seemed content to look for pumpkins, especially since her little sister was too scared to jump in the bouncy house.

After wandering around the pumpkin patch for a bit, she turn to face me with a bright idea.

"Let's make pumpkin muffins!" she squealed. "Can we?"

Now, we all know that when baking with pumpkin, it's far easier to open a can of pumpkin and whack it into a bowl, but we took our time and went the long route.  She picked a pumpkin twice the size of my (big ole) head and we took it home, scraped it, and baked it.  We only needed two cups of pureed baked pumpkin for the recipe, so the rest of it was pureed and frozen.  I'll use it to make pumpkin soup next week.

Once the pumpkin was taken care of and we had our two cups' worth, the girls and I made the yummiest pumpkin muffins ever. (Recipe makes 36 cupcakes.)

But they needed a little somethin'-somethin' so we decided (or maybe I decided) to frost them with cream cheese frosting.  When I make cream cheese frosting, I don't measure. It's just: 1 stick of unsalted butter, 1 brick of cream cheese, about a box of powdered sugar (maybe a little less), and a little lemon zest (or not). Beat it with an electric mixer until fluffy and frost the cooled cupcakes.

Once frosted they were perfection. But the best of all was Bunny saying, "Mamma, I can't wait to take a pumpkin muffin to school for my snack!" ...just before falling asleep.

Nothing beats that.

Comments

[KayB]

We made pumpkin bread on Sunday to take to my now 8-year-old's class for her birthday! The tragedy was the second batch that we made for home was ruined when I broke a measureing cup right over the top of it. The smell of baking bread and then NOT being able to eat it - pure torture!

[izzy's mama]

I am not that fond of pumpkin but those do sound good.

[erin]

Ok - this comment is only slightly related (or not). Really it is a plea for your cooking expertise. My favorite chai here in PDX is Dragonfly chai. They have several different "flavors" and the one I like is "spicy". I ran across your chai recipe a few months ago and it inspired me to try my hand at making some chai. I tested your recipe and compared to the Dragonfly chai - it just wasn't spicy enough. I kept adding spices and finally I bought a bottle of the Dragonfly and realized they use powdered spices, not whole. So on my 5th iteration of your recipe - I finally got a taste I really liked. An opportunity arose when I realized that the spices formed a gelatous mass. Could I use it for anything? I decided to add it to sugar cookie mix. I used the Fannie Farmer sugar cookie mix. I added 1/2 cup chai spice goop (probably need a better name for that) to the wet mix and 1/4 cup of flour at the end to make it into the right consistency. The flavor is nice - even with all the pepper I used in the original recipe. And that amount of goop seems right, too. The problem was that the texture is not great. They were not crispy at all and tasted cakey or flat (not sure how to describe it). Any suggestions? Sorry if this is not the right place to put this. I do think that the chai goop would taste nice in the pumpkin muffins! Take care.