Christmas decorations, food and music shouldn’t be played before the 4th of December. For the past couple of years I have stopped using shops that started “celebrating” too early, unfortunately this now means I can’t set foot in a shopping mall until December.
So you may wonder why I am blog a cranberry dish so early in November? Well the truth is when I saw these fresh cranberries in the supermarket, I had such a hankering for this recipe, I just had to make it.
Can you believe that before today I had never tasted a chestnut before? I remember playing conkers as a child, but I can’t have been very good cause I didn’t even seem to remember what they look after the tough brown outer layer is removed.
With the last of my pumpkin I decided to make muffins, as although I love muffins I only have one blog post on them, the eponymous Coffee Muffin Recipe post.
Recently I have been hearing about the US canned pumpkin shortage but American’s don’t know how easy they’ve got it – I can’t find canned pumpkin anywhere! This makes it more difficult to follow the dozens of Pumpkin recipes out there on the interwebs, so I have had to adapt this Pumpkin Muffin Recipe from Smitten Kitchen.
The brown butter adaption is something that has been running about in the back of head for some time, I loved the idea of a nuttier buttery taste. This recipe like most muffin recipes use oil instead of butter, but I figured that substituting melted butter would work just the same.
The links in the recipe below, take you to subsequent pages of this post that explain how to make each ingredient from scratch.
~ makes 12.
Preheat the oven to 180oC or 350oF. Line a tin with muffin cups, or in my case fairy cake liners.
Add the pumpkin, brown butter, spices, sugar, baking soda and salt (if using), from reading the recipe Smitten Kitchen suggests mixing with a whisk as makes it much harder to over mix.
In another bowl mix the flour and the baking powder. Whisk the flour mixture into the pumpkin batter, until mixed through.
Pour the mixture into the liners making sure each one is around 3/4 full, although I had some extra batter left at the end so I just topped them all up.
Sprinkle on top of each muffin the cinnamon sugar.
Pop the tray into the oven for around 25 to 30 minutes, until they are golden and puffed up. Leave them to cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then allow them to cool further on a wire rack.
When the muffins were ready I was astounded by the wonderful orange colour, so vivid but so natural. It was a beautiful moist muffin, and the spices were just perfect.
I am not sure if on top of the different spices and the pumpkin I could really taste the brown butter in the final muffin, but I could definitely smell it when they were cooking!
This is definitely our favourite muffin recipe in a while, definitely a keeper.
I have been really impressed with the amount of eating you get in a pumpkin, there is hardly any wastage. The pumpkin seeds may actually be my favourite part.
Curried pumpkin seeds can make a really quick and light snack, perfect instead of a bag of crisps or bag of minstrels while watching Xfactor on a Saturday night!
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Pumpkin Muffins