Bisquick From Scratch?

Almost without fail I am that person who must bake everything from scratch.  There will be no cake mixes, no muffin boxes, no icing tubs in my kitchen.  Almost.  You see, long ago in the confines of a college apartment kitchen I threw a pot of soup on the stove, realized I desperately needed warm biscuits to go with it and my addiction to Bisquick was born.  Granted it always was my exception to the no boxed mixes ever rule for the ease with which pancakes and waffles are made on those too sleepy to function mornings but the biscuits.  Oh my goodness those biscuits.  Yet, there was still a part of me that cringed every time I took the box down, a part of me that thought, it can't be that hard to make this mix from scratch, to save all that money spent on a boxed mix.  I have problems.  Feel free to point and laugh.  But here it is, most humbly borrowed from Fake-It Frugal.  As The Husband humorously refers to it:

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!