I'm particularly fond of muffins!

Pumpkin Bat Muffins to start out the holiday (well, brunch really, but still...)  And anytime you can quote Oscar Wilde, it's a good start to the day!

The recipe is really the "Healthy Pumpkin Muffin" recipe, not the "Pumpkin Bat Muffins," but I'm using my cool new muffin tray, so thus the bats.  These muffins aren't particularly sweet, like some pumpkin muffins, but they are very fall-time-tasting, with pumpkin and cinnamon and applesauce and so forth. And as in most things, less sweet means healthier, so it all evens out!

I found the recipe over on Bakespace, a cooking community, and have copied it here with my notes and comments and pictures.  The original is courtesy of Elly  (Bakespace user ELLYKA), so thank you very much, Elly! Gotta give credit where it's due!   And as a side note, Bakespace is a pretty good site to browse through, if you're looking for some new ideas, or some variations on some old ones :) 

Healthy Pumpkin Muffins

Ingredients

• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup all purpose flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 3/4 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. cloves
• 1/8 tsp. nutmeg
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce (you can use vegetable oil instead, but as these are healthy muffins...)
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 3/4 cup lowfat buttermilk
• 1 cup pumpkin puree
• 1/3 cup raisins (optional)
• 1/3 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 and grease a 12-cup muffin tin.
2. Sift together flours, baking powder and soda, and salt. Stir in spices.
3. In a separate bowl, beat egg with brown sugar until well combined.  
4. Stir in vanilla, buttermilk, applesauce and pumpkin puree.
5. Pour wet mixture into dry mixture and stir until just combined. Fold in nuts and raisins, if desired.
6. Pour mixture into muffin cups and bake approximately 18 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. 

Variations

• I don't like raisins in my baked goods, and usually don't like nuts in them either, so I didn't include them.  If you do like them, enjoy :)
• I used "pumpkin pie spice" instead of the spices listed above.  Instead of the individual spices, I substituted a little over 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice.  Next time I make these, I'll probably up it a little to 1 1/2 tsp - I just like a little more cinnamon and spice taste than what I had here :)  If you haven't seen it in your store, pumpkin pie spice is already mixed cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, etc.  Besides pumpkin pie spice being only one can to stock in the pantry, and only one to measure out from, I'm not as fond of cloves either, so another bonus for me :)
• I didn't use much whole wheat flour, but mostly all-purpose. I was just about out of the whole wheat so filled in the rest of what I needed with the all-purpose.  Still tastes good and rose properly, but probably not quite as healthy.
• I used one of the icing decorating tubes to decorate the muffins a little.  They have a cream cheese flavor, which goes well with the pumpkin and spice flavors.  It's rather like the icing and cake combination on carrot cakes.  The icing does run a little (it's not a decorating gel) but it tastes good and adds just a little decorative oomph.  As you can see in the picture above, the icing does run, especially if the muffins are still warm.  I gave up trying to draw a bat (that's what the squiggle is supposed to be) and stuck with the smiley faces.

The bat muffin tray was a lot of fun too.  I mixed the batter a little more when I added the wet to the dry mixes, to make it smoother - fills in the corners of the shaped tray a little better that way.  For the shaped trays, you have to make sure that the tray is very well greased, so the muffin will come out of all the nooks and corners when they are done.  Also, if you want the bottom of the muffin to be flat (i.e., the top of the muffin in the tray), you don't need to fill these as high.  Next time, I won't fill the muffin tray as high, and spread it a little more inside the cup - some of the wings weren't quite as filled out.  Also, I didn't let them cool quite as much as the round muffins before I iced them, so the icing eyes ran a little after I took the picture below.  Oops.  Oh, well, I'll just have to make them again! 

Nutritional Information 
(based on 12 servings - with the smaller bat muffins, I actually made 18 muffins)


Calories: 143
Fat: 3g
Carbs: 27g
Dietary Fiber: 2.4g
Sugar: 2.2g
Protein: 3.8g 
WW points (if you're interested, as I am): 3