Pumpkin Crumble Muffins

Made these guys a lot over the past few weeks. I’m a fall dessert lover through and through. Any slight sign of cool weather and you’ll find me in my cozy sweater, Ugg slippers, hot bev in hand with some sort of pumpkin dessert. This is my new favorite.

I always try to test my recipes on others before posting. Because I have been into this healthy eating thing for over a decade. Don’t even have white or brown sugar or white flour in my house. So when I make a dessert I always wonder if it’s just my adapted taste buds that think it’s out of this world, or if they really are that good. Had these muffins around for Shabbat this past week. We had some close friends over for the weekend, and another couple of friends over in the afternoon. DEVOURED. Double taste check!!

Notable Ingredients

Here are some recipe notes before I dive in:

• coconut sugar can be found in every health food store in the country. I happen to really love the flavor of it because it has a little “caramel” depth to it. Kind of like a mix between regular white sugar and brown sugar if you ask me. It is extracted from the coconut palm sap and retains some of the minerals and nutrients in the palm itself. It also contains some fraction of inulin, a type of dietary fiber that can help gradually raise blood sugar levels as opposed to rapidly raise and decrease them. I won’t say that it is significantly superior to sugar. Both will still raise blood sugar levels. But I always feel better consuming unrefined sugar over a refined white sugar. The chemical processing is just not something I want to be eating regularly. So if I’m going to have a treat, I’d much prefer unrefined sugar options. But you can definitely replace the coconut sugar in the recipe with brown or regular sugar. Both will do the trick.
• Molasses: I wanted to do this recipe right. The flavor combo of molasses and pumpkin plus all the warm spices is just incredible. You can swap the molasses for date syrup though, if you need, A bit about blackstrap molasses nutritionally though: when the sugar cane undergoes its refining process, the molasses is the byproduct of the second boiling process involved. While sugar will go on to further processing, the blackstrap molasses still retains much nutritional value. It holds the lowest sugar content in comparison to all other sugar cane products. Believe it or not, many cultures view it as a superfood because of its high concentration of magnesium and calcium. 1 tbsp is said to reach almost 10% of the daily require value of each. Not telling you do go drink a cup full of molasses. It still is sugar. But at least it’s not just “pure” sugar.
• Pumpkin puree: You can definitely swap this for purees squash, or sweet potato. You can make your own by roasting chunks in A 200 degree celcius oven for 1-1.5 hours and then pureeing. Works like a charm.

Hope this recipe brings warmth to your holiday season this year. We all need a little bit of it now.

Xoxo