Saturday, October 15, 2011

Pumpkin muffins with cinnamon streusel


I was in Boston to attend a conference last month and I entered Trader Joe's to grab a bottle of water. I had five minutes to get in and out. In the span of those few seconds on the way to the cash register, I ended up grabbing a bottle of organic agave syrup, a store-brand brownies mix, and also a dry mix to make pumpkin bread.

All told, I spent just a few bucks if you can believe it. I couldn't believe my eyes. That would never happen in Toronto. Anything organic or foodie is going to set you back, as some of my dear readers will attest. When I came home, I threw open the door to my baking cupboard and things started falling out: piping tips, candles, a jar of maraschino cherries. (I guess I'm one of those clean-counters, messy-cupboards kind of people).

In any case, I started weeding through all the bags of sugar and flour that had accumulated and realized there was no time like Thanksgiving weekend (last weekend for us Canadian folks) to make something with the pumpkin bread mix.

But rather than pumpkin bread, I decided to make pumpkin muffins. I wanted to jazz them up and add some crunch so I quickly looked up a recipe for cinnamon streusel and tossed that together too. At first it looked like I had much too much streusel, and ended up disposing of some of it after putting just a teaspoon or two on top of each muffin cup.

But after I pulled the muffins out of the oven I realized I could have used all the streusel and they would have turned out even better. The streusel gave these muffins that perfect muffin top crunchiness eulogized on Seinfeld.

If you can't get to Trader Joe's or you are secretly judging me for making muffins from a box, than use this recipe from a previous blog post. But you may want to try this cinnamon streusel instead. It doesn't compete with the pumpkin flavours. Just delish.

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