Pumpkin Chocolate-Chip Muffins

When I first saw this recipe a couple weeks ago, I was immediately reminded of my mother’s zucchini bread. The recipes are quite similar, which brought to mind the following logic equation:

If p = D
and m = D
then p + m = D + D

SO, if p represents pumpkin, m represents my mother’s bread, and D represents delicious, then this pumpkin bread is going to be freakin’ delicious.

Oh yeah, high school math. And I thought I’d never use it again. (Admittedly, I had to do some googling to find the logic mathy stuff I was channeling. I hope I don’t have to use it again for another ten years. Five minutes of reading about theorems and direct and indirect proofs gave me a headache.)

I usually opt to transform my mother’s bread recipe into muffins. Both are yummy, but the bread ends up creating a lot of crumbs, and sometimes it’s still a little gooey in the middle. I also tend to be somewhat neurotic when it comes to other people’s bread cutting habits. Some take giant, pig-sized slices. Others do a haphazard cutting job. And then there’s the people that lean on the other end of the bread while they’re hacking off their slice. Come on!

Pumpkin Chocolate-Chip Muffins
(adapted from Living Lou)

yield: 12 muffins

• 1 ½ cups of whole wheat flour
• 1 cup of sugar
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup of pumpkin purée
• ½ cup of olive oil
• 2 eggs
• ¼ cup of water
• 2 tsp pumpkin spice
• 1 cup of chocolate chips (I used mini chips)

Preheat your oven to 350°. Combine dry ingredients in one bowl and wet ingredients in another. Whisk the former into the latter until well blended, then stir in chocolate chips.

Line a standard-sized muffin tin with cupcake wrappers. Fill each one 1/2 to 2/3 of the way with batter. Bake for 20–25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in a muffin center comes out clean. I ended up with 12 smallish muffins (they didn’t quite fill up the cupcake wrappers). Next time, I would either try to make a smidge more batter, or distribute the batter between 11 muffins. And, as theorized, they were deeelicious!