Healthy Tasty Chowcleaner recipes, reviews, toddler mom stuff and food chatter

Have you ever had the delicious Pumpkin Loaf from Starbucks?  It has such a strong pumpkin flavor without being overwhelming, a soft, melt in your mouth texture contrasting with a topping of crunchy pumpkin seeds.  My son snarfed that up in two seconds.  I felt so inspired by witnessing the boy gobble up the bread that I wanted to make something comparable yet gluten free.  I can tell you that these pumpkin muffins don’t taste like the pumpkin loaf, but I veered off that track while developing this recipe and personally craved  pumpkin maple muffins with a maple glaze topping instead.  Also, you would never know these muffins are gluten-free!   I used enough liquids in this recipe that the muffins are plenty moist, and day two  they remind me a little of Mimi’s honey bran muffins.  The glaze has the additional maple flavor that I wouldn’t want to do without.  My taste-testers said they liked the muffins solo- but some raved about the glaze (myself included, hate to admit it but I was loving the full of sugar maple glaze!)   You never really know when people are being honest or just nice - but everyone loved them!  My son kept coming back for more and eventually I had to put a stop to it or he’d be up all night on a sugar high!  He’s always honest and never spares my feelings while taste testing anything:)  However, sometimes he just makes a face by the looks of things so I don’t think he’s the most qualified…

Today my son took me on a walk through the neighborhood- it’s one of very few nice day’s that we’ve had in weeks!  I decided to gather up some leaves for this picture.  Thank you neighbors, for letting me walk into your lawns and pick up leaves!  I did feel a little weird walking around their lawns but there were some pretty leaves that complimented the muffins nicely.   

Ingredients:

• Muffins
• 3/4 cup almond flour
• 1/2 cup brown rice flour
• 1/4 cup buckwheat flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 cup coconut oil, warmed up
• 2 eggs + 3 egg whites
• 1/2 cup maple sugar (ground as fine as you can get it) - if you have 3/4 cup maple sugar, you can use this and omit the 1/4 cup maple syrup entirely…I ran out 
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1 tsp vanilla or maple flavoring/extract
• 1 cup pumpkin
• Maple Glaze
• 9 TB powdered sugar
• 3 TB grade B maple syrup
• 1/2 tsp maple extract or flavoring

Method:

• Pre-heat oven to 350
• Mix dry ingredients in a bowl
• In a separate bowl, beat coconut oil with sugars and maple syrup, add eggs, then pumpkin, then vanilla
• Slowly beat in dry ingredients
• Grease muffin pan or use liners - for mini-muffins, I used a small cookie scoop and for the regular muffins I used a medium-sized cookie scoop.  Fill 3/4 way full.
• Mini-muffins will bake about 15 minutes and regular sized muffins will bake around 25-28 minutes.   Toothpick in center will come out clean.  Do not under-cook (the cupcakes are moist enough that the raw pumpkin flavor will debut which is not good)
• Remove from oven and let sit a few minutes - transfer and cool on wire rack
• With a fork, mix glaze ingredients - I used a spoon for drizzle and also a silicone brush

Not only do these muffins get more moist on day two, but the glaze sinks in a bit (I think the muffins absorb the glaze, hence the honey topped Mimi’s style muffin).  So, for the photo above I made even more glaze for the benefit of the camera.  Oh darn, more glaze on my muffin:)