Jackolantern Muffins

Because it’s Halloween!! And because #NoSugarNovember came a few days early for me this year… and I still wanted to bake something.

It’s hard to find muffins that are actually sweetener-free! But I found a recipe from My Kids Lick the Bowl for unsweetened carrot muffins – which I made and they’re amazing (slightly more like biscuits than muffins maybe…) – and I decided to adapt it to be pumpkin.

The recipe calls for:

– 400g puréed cooked carrots. Turns out this is about 1 can of pumpkin, but when I made the carrot ones I did the math wrong and probably used half that, and the texture turned out better (and they didn’t take as long to bake) so play with it.

– 1/2c oil

– 2 eggs

– 1 1/4c flour (I used gf)

– 1tsp cinnamon (I added 1/4tsp ginger and nutmeg for the pumpkin)

– 1 1/2tsp baking powder

– (I also added a bit of salt)

Mix that all together and put it in a greased muffin tin

For the jackolantern bits, I painstakingly cut the shapes out of dead dough using a knife and a pin! (Dead dough in this case being a mix of flour and water and a tiny bit of oil – don’t worry too much about it, just add stuff til it comes together as a dough)

I also added a drop of red food coloring to my muffin batter and a drop of yellow to my dead dough to make a stronger jackolantern effect.

Then I pushed the dough pieces into the batter so that they were sunk in (otherwise they just end up sitting on top when you’re all done)

And finally I baked them at 350*f – because of all the pumpkin it took ~40 minutes!