Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cream Cheese Muffins (low-carb)

Have you ever had Herman Coffee Cake?  It's one of those batters that you mix and feed over the course of days.  It builds up such a wonderful yeasty flavor... Mmmm...  I digress.  Anyway.  I've been craving something sweet and baked for about the past week or two (PMS, of course... and then into PPMS, which is Post Premenstrual Syndrome... ha ha ha).  I thought about what I had in the cupboards/freezer/fridge and what I could make to temper that craving while looking through my binder of recipes.  I came to a slip of paper that a friend had handwritten a Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffin recipe on.  Her recipe is nut free and egg free, but heavy on sugar and white flour.  I'd made these a couple of times in my previous life as a sugar junkie and knew they were excellent.  So I decided to play around with her recipe by first cutting it in half then making substitutions and adding the cream cheese filling.  Oh, and where I was heading with the Herman Coffee Cake bit was that these remind me of that wonderful treat my mother made when I was a child.  It was loaded with spice and studded with chocolate chips & walnuts then topped with a good soaking from a milk, brown sugar and butter combination.  It stayed moist for days.  This recipe yielded 12 muffins, which I store in the fridge and some in the freezer. 

















Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cream Cheese Muffins
(adapted from friend's recipe)

Mix A:
1/2c pumpkin puree
1/4 + 1/8c almond milk
1/4c canola oil*
1/4c coconut oil
1/2c xylitol
1/4c stevia

Mix B:
1/2c coconut flour
1/2c flax meal
1/2c almond meal
1 tsp baking soda
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
4oz Hershey's Sugar-Free Choc.Chips

Mix C:
4 oz cream cheese, softened
1 Tbsp sweetener**
1 egg
1/2 Tbsp coconut flour

Heat oven to 400.  Line 12 muffin wells with paper cups.  Make each mix in 3 medium mixing bowls.  Add Mix B to Mix A and combine well.  Divide batter evenly into muffin pan.  Make an indent in middle of each muffin with back of spoon.  Drop a scoop of Mix C into each indent.  Pop into oven for 15-20mns.

*Once I combined Mix A and Mix B, I realized that the coconut flour was making the batter extra thick.  I have a small amount of canola oil to use up, so I chose to add this to add more moisture.  Reason being that the original recipe from my friend actually called for 1c of oil and since I cut the recipe in half here, I figured a 1/2c total for oil.  I recall having made the original muffins with 1/2 the amount of oil called for and they'd turned out well then, too.  So the next time I make these I will replace that 1/4c canola with either an additional amount of fruit puree or almond milk.  Made as posted above, these are extremely moist.

**Use sweetener of choice.  While I realize that the use of artificial sweeteners is not something that Jorge Cruise advises (actually, he totally doesn't want you to do it), I used Da Vinci's French Vanilla Sugar-Free flavored syrup so that I could use what I've got on hand and get both sweetness and a little flavor from one ingredient.