Pumpkin Muffins--healthy style

I have a recipe for a pumpkin cake with a brown sugary caramel-y frosting. Oh, it's good. It's very good. Kip likes me to make the cake into muffins with chocolate chips instead of frosting. Those are very good too. And they have twice the pumpkin as the muffins made from yesterday's recipe. Which already makes them kind of healthy, right? I said, right? Okay, so there is a lot of sugar and a fair amount of oil, and I do sometimes have guilt issues--at least until dessert time rolls around. So, I decided to dink around with the recipe. Have I mentioned that I cannot help myself.

This is what I came up with. It's pretty good. In fact as a breakfast muffin with absolutely tons of vitamin A, it's very good. But it is not pumpkin cake with caramel-y frosting. And it is not pumpkin muffins with lots of sugar, oil, and chocolate chips. (For those you'll have to wait a few more days--it's always best to introduce the healthy recipe first. Because once you've had the dessert version, well, sometimes it's hard to go back. Which brings me to my next point...[What, you didn't think I'd ever get to my next point?])

My next point is that I was kind of disappointed when I tasted these just out of the oven. Oh, sure, they looked beautiful. And I'd been generous with the chocolate chips, being a little worried about cutting the sugar by quite a bit. But they just weren't that other muffin--the one with twice the fat and more than double the sugar. I resolved that in pumpkin muffins I'd just have to accept that they don't healthify that well and that I would have to make the ones I like, and just limit how often/many I consumed. (Which, truly, is never a terrible idea.)

But then these cooled. They were much much better cool. My kids liked them, and they were definitely growing on me too.

They have, with the chocolate chips, about 2 teaspoons of sugar per muffin (without chocolate chips you're looking at just over 1 t sugar), tons of vitamin A, and whole grains.

Let me know if you enjoy them. Just remember to let them cool and not to make them on the same day as pumpkin cake with caramel-y frosting.

Breakfast Pumpkin Muffins
Makes 12

1 C whole wheat flour
1/2 C white flour
6 Tablespoons white sugar
1/2 C oil
2 eggs
1 1/2 C pumpkin puree (mine came from a can)
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t cinnamon
1/2 t allspice
1 C chocolate chips

Combine sugar, oil, eggs, and pumpkin. Sift flours, baking soda, and spices.* Add wet to dry and mix until incorporated. Do not beat the daylights out of these (or any muffins, please, ever.) Add chocolate chips.

Bake at 325 for 20 minutes. (They might look wet still if you just peek in the oven. Take them out and stick a fork in. They have a very wet appearance and if you wait for them to look dry/done, you're going to have a disgusting burned muffin.)

*Lazy Chef Confession: I always do my wet ingredients, then throw the dry ingredients over them and sort of stir the dry ingredients around with a fork or whisk on top of the wet. Then I just mix them in to the wet. That's right--I do not use 2 bowls for wet and dry, and I do not sift. Ever. Thank you. I feel better having gotten that off my chest.

PRINTABLE RECIPE