For whatever reason, I seem to end up with spare pumpkin all the time. I’m a fan of roasting great burly hunks of the orange beasts for stews and curries but I also spin my own puree in the fall when fresh examples are stacked at the local roadside farms for mere pennies. Hint – the day AFTER Halloween is the best time to stock the larder. Frozen or canned, it will fuel the coming winter’s worth of baking efforts. Store-bought versions aren’t horrible in a pinch as long as you get 100% pure pumpkin without any added spices or preservatives but like most things from the industrial food complex, it’s a pale imitation of the freshly made from your own kitchen.
If there’s a trick to baking with pumpkin it’s to keep it light. Pumpkin-laced cheesecake to pumpkin-enhanced cinnamon rolls are all the rage these days but either they don’t use enough pumpkin to get decent flavour or they load so much in you get pumpkin bricks. I’ve balanced flavour and texture inside this muffin after many tweaks and far too many lumpy failures. Just a scant few cranberries and not so much sugar lets the pumpkin goodness burst through like the headless horseman instead of being hidden behind muddled muffin chemistry that is the bane of mass produced baking stodge. With good tea you could not ask for a better, more satisfying afternoon respite.
As an aside, I don’t normally like silicone bake ware. They don’t brown the goods in the least. In this case however I really like that effect for a lighter, more tender muffin. Plus you don’t need to prep the silicone cups at all. Just dump the batter straight into them. Since pumpkin will restrict the rise somewhat compared to ordinary muffins, you can fill the cups with a bit more batter than usual.
Pumpkin Muffins with Lift
50 grams (~ 1/3 cup) dried cranberries
250 grams (~ 2 cups) pastry flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1 large egg
250 ml (~ 1 1/3 cup) pumpkin puree *
100 g (~ 6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, melted
150 grams brown sugar
100 grams white sugar
120 ml (~ 1/2 cup) fresh 18% cream or tinned evaporated milk
* tinned or fresh-made 100% pumpkin can be used but depending on the daily humidity, you might need to add 2-4 tablespoons milk or water to the recipe when mixing.
Yield: Twelve small or six large muffins
Preheat oven to 190C (375F).
Add the cranberries to a small bowl and cover with warm water. Set aside to soak for ten minutes before draining completely.
Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Add the sugars and mix by hand to break up any lumps. Add the fully drained cranberries to the dry mix and toss to coat each completely. Set aside.
In a small food processor, whip the egg for ten seconds with the standard cutting blade. Then with the machine running, drizzle in the butter over the next twenty seconds. Add the pumpkin and cream and continue to process until much lighter in colour, about thirty seconds. You are making a pumpkin emulsion to help with lift here.
Add the pumpkin mixture to the blended dry ingredients and fold with a spatula until JUST BARELY mixed. A few spots of unmixed flour are better than over mixing in this case. Allow to stand for five minutes. No. Really. Step away from the bowl and wait or you’ll have dense muffins and bad kitchen karma.
Fill the prepared muffin tins nearly full since there isn’t lots of ‘lift’ with pumpkin. The ingredient proportions are generous enough to allow for most any size tin and you might have enough left over for a ‘bonus’ muffin or two. Bake for twelve minutes. Rotate the tray and bake for a further ten to twenty minutes, depending on the size of your muffins, until a knife inserted comes out clean or they reach roughly 96C (205F) internal temperature.
Allow to cool on a rack for at as long as it takes to make tea before slathering them with butter and devouring the the whole plate.
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