Another round two

During my recent hospital stay I had the pleasure of being served a pumpkin bran muffin. Almost as soon as I tasted this muffin I thought about trying to make a batch for myself. Sadly, the hospital didn't include the recipe, or even a list of ingredients, with the muffin.

Perhaps even more frustrating than the hospital's lack of diligence on the recipe front is that the web seems to have been flooded with recipes for pumpkin bran muffins that didn't appear to be what I was looking for (many had too much spice or other aspects that I found displeasing).

Anyway, after looking at about a dozen recipes for pumpkin bran muffins I thought that I had finally found one that would meet all of my needs. Yesterday morning I got up at about 6:00 AM and threw a batch together.

Not long after I took the muffins out of the oven for the first time I realized that I had a somewhat severe problem on my hands. The outer layer had developed a leathery texture. This problem was paired with another problem, the innards of the muffin were still relatively raw and doughy.

Though I did eat two of these muffins, they were basically inedible. The one aspect of the muffins that I did like was the level of spicing, which was minimal and not exclusively cinnamon (there was also a little ginger and nutmeg and there would have been allspice had I had any).

After this relatively disappointing failure I was still left with the better part of an open can of pumpkin puree so it was clear that another batch of these muffins would be in my future, though this time with a somewhat modified recipe.

Maybe it should have been obvious to me from the beginning, but while thinking through my first failure I realized that I might consider modifying the the recipe I normally use for bran muffins to accomodate the addition of pumpkin puree.

When I got down to doing an ingredient-by-ingredient examination of the recipe I determined realized that I would likely only have to make a few modifications the the recipe. The primary change would be exchanging the molasses and some of the milk for the pumpkin puree. I decided that I would also add the spicing component from the first recipe.

In the end the recipe I settled on in as follows:

1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup pumpkin puree
3/4 cup milk
1 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 cup wheat bran
3/4-1 tsp pumpkin pie spice

Combine the brown sugar and then add and mix the eggs, pumpkin puree, milk, and bran. Add the baking soda, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, and flour and mix. Scoop into greased muffin tray (12 large/medium muffins) and bake at 400 F until done (probably between 15 to 20 minutes).

While I am not sure that this will be the definitive pumpkin bran muffin recipe for all time I am certainly pleased with the results and am inclined plan on using it when I next want to make pumpkin bran muffins.