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Yesterday, I baked pumpkin muffins using a pumpkin that I bought last month as a porch decoration for Halloween month. My pumpkin was a medium size and from experience, I knew that when I roasted it, it was going to yield several desserts for us as a family of four. [Skip this story and jump straight to the Pumpkin Muffin Ingredients and Recipe Steps.]

Cutting, Roasting, Dividing, and Freezing the Cooked Pumpkin

Immediately after I roasted (1 hour) and cooled this medium sized pumpkin, I removed the skin of the pumpkin and then broke the pumpkin flesh into many pieces. I only needed to puree about 2 cups of it at the time for a recipe and froze the rest in freezer bags. I divided them into 4 different bags that had about 2 cups of pumpkin each so that I could easily just pull 1 out for a dessert recipe when I needed to make a pumpkin dessert.
  
Thus far, I've baked a pumpkin pie and about 14 pumpkin muffins from this roasted pumpkin and I still have over half of the pumpkin left frozen in the freezer! 

It did feel like a lot of work to remove the insides of the pumpkin, roast, peel the skin, break them into pieces and puree it when I could just go buy a can of pureed pumpkin from the grocery store for about $3 for a 15 oz can. However, it just felt so rewarding to bake Thanksgiving or fall desserts from scratch. It is an art that takes hours of love and care. Since it has been getting colder now, using the oven to make these desserts warmed up the house with a comfort feeling that spread the wonderful cinnamon smell throughout our home.

My desserts are not perfectly shaped like the ones at the stores but I feel like my non-cookie cutter desserts easily convey and show that they are original, and not store-bought.

My husband brought these to his work to share and they were gone within minutes.

Pumpkin Muffins Ingredients

The recipe that I used was from: https://joyfoodsunshine.com/pumpkin-muffins/ but in case that website is ever down, here are the ingredients that I used below. I want to note that instead of using sea salt, I just used regular salt.

• 2 cups of pumpkin puree (thawed mine from frozen roasted pumpkin pieces and then squeezed the excess liquid from them before I pureed it all in the blender)
• 1/2 cup of unsalted butter (melted)
• 3/4 cup of dark brown sugar
• 3/4 cup of granulated white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 1 3/4 cups of all purpose flour (I used unbleached)
• 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice
• 1.5. teaspoon of cinnamon powder
• 2 teaspoon of baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt

Pumpkin Muffin Recipe Steps

1. Preheat the oven to bake at 375 degrees F.
2. First, I mixed the first 2 ingredients (pumpkin puree and melted butter) in one bowl and then mixed the last 5 ingredients (all purpose flour, pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon powder, baking power, and salt) in another bowl because you'll need to separate the wet and dry at the beginning. 
3. After the first 2 ingredients have been mixed with a whisk, I added the dark brown and white sugar to this "wet" bowl. I mixed until I was sure there were no more sugar lumps. Then, after that, I mixed the eggs and vanilla extract to this "wet" bowl. 
4. After I've mixed the ingredients in the "wet" bowl throughly, I poured the contents from the "dry" bowl into the "wet" bowl and whisked gently until it's all combined. 
5. By the time, I've finished mixing, my oven was at 375 degrees F. I took my muffin pans out and placed muffin paper cups into them. I used a small ladle to scoop my mix to each paper cup. I tried to level the tops and then placed the muffin baking pans in the middle rack of the oven and baked for 21 minutes. Make sure there is a space between the pans on the rack.
6. When the timer went off after 21 minutes, I took the pans out of the oven and let the muffins cool in the pan for about 6 minutes. Then, I gently removed each muffin from the pan and started eating one! Yum! I felt like I may over baked them by a hair in my oven so next time, I will decrease the time to just 19 minutes. That's just a personal preference as they were at hit for my husband's work!