Raisinhater Favorites

I love fall. I love the changey leaves, the crisp air, having an excuse (“football”) to spend all of Sunday laying on the couch, and the return of cozy foods like risotto. And I love the pumpkins! Pumpkin pie, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin bread – all delicious and festive. I’m not a fan of everything pumpkin though. I’ll pick normal over pumpkin risotto any day, and I don’t enjoy pumpkin’s evil cousin, squash, which is just baby food for adults.

Normally I use this method to augment my pumpkin consumption…



But I'm trying to branch out a bit so last night I tried to make a batch of pumpkin muffins. Unfortunately, when I got home from the store with my spooky little Halloween theme muffin papers, I couldn’t find my muffin tin, only my mini muffin tins. I know I had a regular size muffin tin because I went through a phase in law school where I made myself healthy bran muffins for breakfast (in attempt to avoid the biscuit drive through). They were big size. So where was the tin? My kitchen really isn’t that big, so after I looked in my two cabinets and in the oven, I gave up and decided on one pumpkin cake and 12 mini pumpkin muffins.

I based my recipe on my favorite banana bread recipe, leaving out the nuts and substituting pumpkin for banana. Really, it is not so much banana bread as it is chocolate chip banana cake, but calling it “bread” certainly makes it sound a bit more healthy. I used this pumpkin stuff.



Do not taste the pumpkin stuff. It may look like a pumpkin pie but it is NOT, it tastes mealy and bad and not pie like. It will make you unhappy. I added the baking soda to the butter first, before the sugar, because I am an idiot, and I used mini chips – perhaps a cup, perhaps a little more.

When I got everything all mixed up it was way, well, stiffer than the banana bread. It was definitely VERY different. I didn’t really know what to do about that, adding another egg sounded like it would make the whole thing gloppy, sort of heavy and wet rather than heavy and dry, so I just smeared it into the pan and the muffin cups and threw it in the oven.

Do you know how hard it is to butter and flour mini muffin cups?

I baked the muffins for 25 minutes and the cake for 50 minutes.



They taste pretty good (if you like mini chocolate chips) but they really aren’t noticeably pumpkinny. Not really like pumpkin pie in cake form, which is what I was going for. My rating: C minus. I’m definitely going to have to give it another try.