pumpkin chocolate chip muffins

Muffins to our family…well, you could say the two words are actually synonymous. Muffins=family! I already had a love for being in the kitchen, creating, baking, decorating…my mom was always very willing to let me be creative when I was young. The kitchen was my canvas and she was my perpetual sous chef! She was so willing to encourage me, buy my ingredients and then clean up after me! Bless her for that, she set so much in motion!

When Drew and I got married little did I know how much more of an education I would get about baking in the kitchen. His mom, Patsy Daniels, is basically legendary here in Provo, UT. From what I understand and have learned, she was basically Betty Crocker in this town. To this day I will meet long time residents of Provo and when they learn who my mother-in-law is, they seriously rave about all her culinary creations. She passed away ten years ago in January and we all miss her so very much! We all treasure the recipes and legacy of her being in the kitchen making culinary creations for those that she loved! One of her favorite sayings: “Work is love made visible” by Kahlil Gibran – she was the epitome of this!

One thing in particular that EVERYONE has fond memories of…her muffins! She passed along a few of the family recipes to me, taught me how to make them and how to make them simply amazing! From there I totally ran with it! For nearly the past 25 years I’ve been making muffins for family, friends, school groups, church get togethers, baby showers, fund raisers…lots and lots and lots of muffins! During the summer of 2012 we were in the beginning stages of opening up a local bakery so we could feed the local Provonians these muffins by the box fulls.

Then, as life often does, it came at us FAST! Drew’s dad became ill, my mom passed away suddenly and then as you may have read on our blog (click here for Makenna’s story), in early 2013, my sweet Makenna became horribly sick. Life certainly took us in a different direction, which we can see now is the path that was intended for us and we couldn’t be happier about it!

So! Muffins, as I mentioned are love for us…and since we began our Paleo journey a couple years ago…we had been missing this “love” and tried many times to recreate a Paleo version that was even close…didn’t happen!!

We had a glimmer of hope last Fall when we heard about this new cassava flour that the blogosphere was a buzz about – Otto’s Cassava Flour! Life changing for this home! First thing we made was tortilla’s…seriously?! To quote happy mouths here “Is this real life?” – “are these really grain free?” – “wait, these are Paleo…damn!” Haha, I knew that with some experimenting and happy taste testers I’d have to be able to recreate some of the “muffin love” we’d been missing for a couple years.

So once the busy-ness of the holidays passed, the testing began in January – much tweaking, consulting with fellow Paleo baking bloggers, researching gluten free baking and several attempts later…it all happened and we are soooooooooooooo EXCITED because we have a winner! Not to mention we once again have exclamations of amazingness happening here.

Even though Pumpkin Chocolate Chip muffins are certainly more popular in the Fall, they are just basically the family favorite…year round! Doesn’t matter, they are always the most requested! Not to mention they are the love of my life’s favorite too…so it was a simple choice! I’d do anything for that man!

So, what you have here is a labor of love that has special meaning for many of the reasons mentioned above. A family treasure remade to keep our tummies happy! Hope you enjoy…and we’ll be experimenting on many more of the muffins we also enjoy! Stay posted!!

paleo pumpkin chocolate chip muffins

Servings: 6-8
Time: under an hour
Difficulty: easy
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one of the fluffiest grain-free & paleo pumpkins muffins around

Credit: backporchpaleo.com

Ingredients

¾ c Otto’s Cassava Flour
¼ c potato starch
1 T psyllium husk powder
2-3 T Pumpkin Pie Spice* (we buy ours here)
2 T ccoconut sugar crystals
½ t Redmond Real Salt
1 T baking soda
¼ t baking powder
2 eggs, room temperature
1 t vanilla
½ c grass-fed butter, melted
1 c pumpkin puree (be sure it’s just the puree and not the pumpkin pie puree)
½ c maple syrup (room temperature)
½-¾ c dark chocolate chips
¼-½ c chopped pecans (optional)

Directions

Preheat oven to 360°
Line muffin tin with parchment liners, set aside.
Whisk dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl (first 8 ingredients) till well combined, toss chocolate chips and nuts (if using) in and set aside.
Whisk vanilla, butter, pumpkin puree and maple syrup together till combined, add eggs and whisk again till completely mixed and eggs are all incorporated.
Add wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir to combine.
Scoop batter into lined muffin tins, you should get 7-8 – we only got 7, but we like them tall!
Add a few more chocolate chips and chopped nuts to the top, totally optional…but they look pretty with more decoration on top! Remember you eat with your eyes first!
Bake for 18-20 minutes or until toothpick inserted comes out clean.
Remove from oven, let sit for 5 minutes in muffin tin then tip them over on their sides to finish cooling. You don’t want them to cool completely in the tin…they will get soggy bottoms! Ya, and that’s not the best when referring to food!

*this amount will vary depending on the potency of your pumpkin pie spice blend, we like ours more on the “spicy” side, but you may prefer not as much as we do! We go for the full on 3T full…no question!

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