Cranberry pumpkin muffins

 

Ready or not, it's daylight savings time. We eased into the morning with these muffins. Now if it would just stop snowing already.

Cecile’s cranberry pumpkin muffins
Adapted from the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers website, which naturally has recipes to encourage you to use their product. It does not explain who Cecile is, but she makes a decent muffin.

Ingredients
¼ cup butter, room temperature
1¼ cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup pumpkin puree
1½ cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 cup chopped fresh cranberries
½ cup chopped walnuts

Method
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line or grease 12 muffin cups.

In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar until creamy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Blend in pumpkin. Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Blend into pumpkin mixture until just moistened. Fold in cranberries and walnuts.

Divide among 12 muffin cups. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes  until done. 

Rating: These were fast to assemble in the morning because I'd mixed the dry ingredients the night before, chopped the cranberries and set the butter out to soften.I don't know that they're super looky, but they're reasonably tasty and have good texture. They remind me of eating spice cake in muffin form, which is a perfectly fine way to start the day. 

What they don't taste like is pumpkin, which mainly seems to serve to give the muffins a touch of color and plenty of moisture. That somehow surprised me, but I guess it shouldn't have, because looking at other pumpkin muffin recipes, they tend to contain a higher percentage of actual pumpkin. This could be to its advantage in being repeated as a recipe, however, because so often you get a recipe that only uses part of a can of pumpkin and you have an odd amount left to work with. I wonder if that's how this recipe got its genesis.