Magical Pumpkin Muffins Two Ways -- Tuesdays with Dorie

It's not every day that you replace your 'old standby' recipe, especially for a special seasonal treat like pumpkin muffins. We love pumpkin muffins here so I was really excited when Kelly of Sounding My Barbaric Gulp chose Dorie's Pumpkin Muffins, you can visit her page for the recipe. I do have a favorite pumpkin muffin recipe, from an old Polish cookbook, that I usually use, but I am always willing to try another. Thanks for a great choice Kelly, these are my new favorite pumpkin muffins! Do you want to know the best part? Everyone in my family liked these, yes, even my super picky husband, he requested I make a second batch tomorrow 'plain' (he doesn't like add ins), and I'll be happy to oblige. I'm just happy that out of the past almost 20 weeks of TWD recipes I've tried he finally really really likes one. My kids loved them too, and come on, you know I loved them :)

I decided to skip the suggested add-ins, pecans, golden raisins, and sunflower seeds, they sound wonderful and I will be sure to try them at some point, but making these I knew I needed to do something chocolate -- in the pantry I had some mini M&Ms baking bits, perfect! I made these mostly for the kiddos. I usually make mini pumpkin chocolate chip loafies around Halloween, I call them mini Halloween breads, chocolate and pumpkin, is there anything more Halloween? I also did a 'grown-up' version with dried Michigan cherries (yum!) and honey roasted sliced almonds (Almond Accents.)

I had enough batter to fill my new silicone itty bitty bundt pan, and with the left over bit of batter I used my baby bundt pan (bigger than the itty bitty) and made two giant baby bundt pumpkin muffins, did you catch all that? I did use a whole teaspoon of cinnamon, 3/4 teaspoon, really? That's just silly. Spice is nice. Also, I baked at 350 for 20 minutes. I feel really bad for anyone who tried these at 400 for 25 minutes and ended up with burned bottoms. Not your fault! We bake a lot of muffins (usually every Monday we have muffin Mondays and bake a batch for the week) and after making tons and tons of muffins I never bake at anything higher that 375, and 99% of the time I do 350, just to be safe. You can always keep them in the oven a little longer, but you can't really salvage burned muffins :(

My husband called this one a psychedelic pumpkin muffin...

"Magical Pumpkin Muffin Forest"

Please welcome these delicious muffins to Nummy Kitchen's TWD Top Five!

Tuesdays with Dorie Top Five

1. Dimply Plum Cake
2. Pumpkin Muffins
3. Apple Cheddar Scones
4. Black and White Banana Loafies
5. Lenox Almond Biscotti