Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

It's Thanksgiving! Ok, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, but we're close enough. We had a huge Thanksgiving meal last Saturday with my family and combined it with the girls' birthday party. Tomorrow we're having Thanksgiving with Dave's family. For both dinners, we are having this delightful Thanksgiving baked good. It's now a traditional part of my family's Thanksgiving dinner and I want to share it with everyone.

This recipe comes from Jandy. She has an awesome website, Jandy's Reading Room. If you like to read, check out her website. Jandy (which is not her real name, in case you were wondering) happens to be very important to me too. She's my mom! Now, I know I've said all these wonderful things and you're thinking "well of course you'd say that, she's your mom" but I promise you, lots of other people agree with me and many of them aren't related to her. So take some time and check out her website. Also, make the recipe, it's yummy!

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1 cup plain pumpkin puree (half of a 1 pound can. Make sure it's not pumpkin pie mix! They look almost identical!)
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 2/3 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon pumpkin pie spice
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup chocolate chips (if you make the mini muffin version, use mini chocolate chips)

Heat your oven to 350 degrees.

Get your muffin tins together, either by greasing them or putting in paper baking liners.

I doubled the recipe, so the pictures will show everything at twice what it normally looks like (except the final pic, I only took a picture of one muffin tin). The recipe above is for a single, not a doubled recipe. Remember that!

In a large bowl, combine the eggs, pumpkin and melted butter. Whisk until well blended.

I used my mixer instead of a whisk, but it will still look like this.

Next, add the dry ingredients except the chocolate chips and blend it well. I forgot to take a picture at this stage, sorry!

Add the chocolate chips into the mix and stir them in gently. Like this:

Scoop the batter into the muffin tins.

The cups should be 2/3 to 3/4 of the way full. Bake until springy to the touch. Generally 20 to 25 minutes. Allow them to cool.

While you can eat them right away, these are best if they are stored for a day or two before. You can reheat if needed. We usually make them the day or two before and store in a plastic bag.

Variations! Yes, there are two variations to this recipe!

Mini Muffin Variation: You make them almost the same. The only difference to the recipe is use mini chocolate chips instead of regular chocolate chips. Bake them in mini muffin tins for 17 to 20 minutes. It makes 36 mini muffins.

Non-Chocolate Variation: My family loves the muffins this way too and will be good for those wanting slightly healthier muffins and/or you have someone who doesn't eat chocolate. Follow the recipe, except skip adding the chocolate chips. You can make either the regular or mini muffin version without chocolate chips. It doesn't effect the baking time at all.

Half-Wheat Blueberry Muffins

Yes, I'm back. Sorry, it's been a week. I have been baking, but can you say catastrophic failure? Because I certainly can. I'm working on the fix and hopefully we'll have a working recipe within the next few days.

In the mean time, I have a different recipe. A healthy (ish) recipe! As you can see, this is called "Half-Wheat". It's a play on Whole Wheat since half the flour in this recipe happens to be Whole Wheat! It's fun, it's exciting and it's not too bad overall for your health!

Ingredients:
3 Tablespoons butter, melted and cooled
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour (if you don't want to use whole wheat flour or don't have it on hand, you can use 2 cups all purpose instead)
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 egg
3 6oz containers blueberry yogurt
1/2 cup milk
1 cup fresh or frozen (not thawed!) blueberries
Cooking Spray

Tools:
Muffin pan
Large bowl
Small bowl
Spoon

Turn the oven to 375 degrees. While that starts, melt the butter in the small bowl and spray the muffin tin (or use paper cups if you prefer)

Once you have those two going, in the large bowl mix all the dry ingredients, like this:

It will look a little bit darker than your regular muffin mix. This is the whole wheat flour, don't worry about it!
The butter should have melted and had a chance to cool by now. Take it out of the microwave and add the egg. Beat well. Next, add the yogurt and the milk and mix well. This picture shows the egg, butter and yogurt (I added the milk later due to thickness issues, but you should add it now instead)

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix well using the wooden spoon. Mix carefully, so it looks like this:

It should be pretty thick, another feature of whole wheat flour. Whole wheat flour is denser than all purpose flour because it is not ground down quite as fine. Add the blueberries and fold them in gently.

Add the mix to the muffin tin and bake for 20 minutes. They will come out looking a bit darker than normal blueberry muffins, but you should be able to stick a toothpick in the middle (or a knife) and come out clean.

Allow them to cool and serve.

Oh, another new feature! A reader emailed me and asked about printing the recipes. It turns out that when you hit "Print", most of the recipes are coming out 5 or more pages long! This is bad and I'm working on fixing this. You may notice a "Print Now" button at the bottom. DON'T PUSH IT! It still prints out 4 or 5 pages long. Instead, I'm going to do a "cliff notes" version at the bottom of every recipe. Simply copy this and paste it to a word processing program and print it from there. Much shorter that way!

Ingredients:

1 cup all purpose flour                                      1 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup sugar                                                   1/4 tsp salt
3 tsp baking powder                                        1 tsp cinnamon
3 Tbsp butter, melted                                       1 egg
3 6oz container blueberry yogurt                       1/2 cup milk
1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen (not thawed)

1. Preheat the oven to 375. Melt the butter and spray the muffin pan/line with papers
2. Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl
3. Mix the butter and egg in a small bowl
4. Add the yogurt and milk to the small bowl and mix
5. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix with a wooden spatula
6. Add the blueberries and fold them into the batter
7. Pour the batter into the muffin pan and bake for 20 minutes.