Pumpkin Coconut Chocolate Chip Muffins, Gluten Free

More punkin'

These are so delicious.

I got the basic recipe from allrecipes.com, but have altered it significantly to make it gluten free and to fit with the ingredients that I had on hand, so it's really not the same recipe anymore.

First of all, you'll need to roast your pumpkin.  If you don't have any, come see me.  Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Lightly grease a cookie sheet that has a rim on it.  The pumpkin will seep some juice out and you don't want it running all over your oven.  Cut the pumpkin in half.  Scoop out the seeds and pulp.  Save the seeds to roast later because they're very yummy.   Place the pumpkin, hollow side down, on the cookie sheet and bake/roast it until you can pierce it with a fork very easily.  

Sometimes, the peel will separate from the meat of the pumpkin and you can just pull it right off.  If not,  just use a spoon to scoop it out into a bowl and mash it with a potato masher.  Throw the peel and the pulp to the chickens.

Let the pumpkin cool on the countertop or the refrigerator.

Now for the muffins.

2 cups pumpkin puree

4 eggs, beaten

3/4 cup butter, softened*

3/4 cup canola oil

1/2 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

3 cups gluten free flour**

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 heaping tsp. xanthan gum

3/4 cup flaked coconut

3/4 cup chocolate chips

* For a healthier option (but, really, is healthy what we're going for with a muffin?), the butter can be replaced with applesauce.

** I usually use Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free All-Purpose Flour, but other brands or your own mix will work as well, providing you know what you're doing when you make a baking mix.

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease and flour muffin pans or use paper liners.  I use silicone muffin pans, which don't require greasing.  This recipe made 12 regular sized muffins and 24 mini muffins.

2.  Blend together the pumpkin puree, eggs, oil, butter, and sugar in a large bowl.  Combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and xanthan gum in a separate bowl.  Slowly add the flour mixture to the pumpkin mixture.  Fold in the coconut and chocolate chips.  Scoop the resulting batter into the muffin pans.  For the mini muffins, a large cookie scoop worked well for me.

3.  Bake in preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean and the tops are a light golden color, 20-30 minutes.  Allow to cool completely on a wire rack.

Thinking of Autumn

I'm a summer girl all the way.  Love summer.  But, I must admit, that I would enjoy a little cooler weather right about now, especially when the pumpkins are looking so fall-ish.  We actually have had a fairly mild summer temperature wise and it has been lovely, but the whole year has been very dry.  If we didn't have a deep water well, there is no way I could have kept my garden (which I expanded this year) so productive all season.

These are the pumpkins I picked just today, 18 of them.  I've picked at least that many already and have probably as many that aren't ripe yet.  I rinse them off in my handy ol' farm sink, then carry as many as I can and line them up on the fence to later make several trips carrying them to the house.

These pumpkins are grown from heirloom seeds, called Jack O' Lantern, from my survival seed kit that I bought a couple of years ago.  I think they're a type of sugar pumpkin and they are quite sweet when roasted even without any kind of seasoning.

Once again, I've taken to the internet in search of tasty pumpkin recipes.  Every few days, I roast a couple of pumpkins and butternuts, scoop out the meat and freeze it for later use.  But, I'm trying to use them fresh, too, as well as giving many away.

I had a good harvest of potatoes, too, which have been sitting in a box in the breezeway where I store my extra produce.  I was rinsing those off in the farm sink before I brought them in until I read that they will last longer if you don't rinse them.  So the last bunch (about half the harvest) that I dug up, I just put in the box with the dirt still on them.  Guess what?  Not true.  I had to go through the box yesterday and throw out about half of the potatoes because they're starting to go bad.  And it's the ones that I left the dirt on that are going bad.  The ones I rinsed off are still fine.