Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins

It's Fall.  Well really it's now Winter but sometimes I like to pretend that it's still that perfect Fall where there's a chill in the air but it hasn't started slipping into Winter weather just yet and it's certainly not the apparent nine months of dreariness that is the North-West.  But that's ok.  I have a pick-me-up for that.  A solution if you will.

For some reason pumpkin flavored things are forever stuck in my mind as a Fall thing, they are most certainly not for Winter.  No sirree!  So when searching for the perfect item to satisfy my constant chocolate craving and make it feel like fall Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins seemed to fit the bill quite nicely.  I found a fantastic recipe in The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book for Spiced Pumpkin Bread, inserted chocolate where it called for nuts and cranberries, followed their advice on turning a bread into a muffin (P.S. it's just baking them for half the time!), and voila!

Perfection!

We start off with just oh so many delightful ingredients...nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger...mmm

Mix certain ingredients together

Sift in the dry ones. (Although almost all directions will have you mix these in a separate bowl and then combine.  I'm a firm believer in using as few dishes as possible...)

Mmmm

Add the chocolate chips.  You may look at these proportions and think that 1 C does not seem like enough and let's double the chocolate experience.  May I kindly suggest that you have some restraint and learn from my experience?  You wouldn't want to overpower the pumpkin taste now would you?

Bake the deliciousness

And oh my, this is when it gets dangerous!

I thought making muffins would be better than bread.  I thought my self-control would be alright.  If you think you can do it good luck to you!  If you fall down the slippery slope of "I'll only eat one for breakfast, there's pumpkin in it, that's a vegetable" or "I can eat two for lunch there's vegetables and chocolate, it's like a whole meal in one!" don't say I didn't warn you!

Enjoy and happy baking!

The recipe:

2 C all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1 15oz can pumpkin

1 C sugar

1 stick unsalted butter, melted and cooled

2 eggs

2 tsp vanilla 

1 C chocolate chips

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease muffin pans
• In a medium bowl, whisk the pumpkin, sugar, melted butter, eggs, and vanilla together until smooth
• Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, and ginger. (If you choose to do this in a separate bowl they need to be whisked.  Whenever I bake I add the dry ingredients second via the mesh sifter/colander/what have you shown above which accomplishes the same thing.)
• Gently fold the batter together with a rubber spatula until just combined
• Gently add in the chocolate chips
• Pour batter into muffin tins filling about 2/3 full
• Bake 22-26 minutes or until golden brown and an inserted toothpick comes out clean. (For bread bake 45-55 minutes.)
• Let cool in tins for approximately 10 minutes before placing on wire racks to further cool