Pumpkin is about my favorite ingredient ever.  I missed a lot of good fall cooking opportunities because of all of my adventures, but thankfully I have another few solid weeks of pumpkin and squash-based cuisine.  I’ve been stockpiling recipes for the last six weeks, but I decided to start with a classic: pumpkin-chocolate chip muffins, featuring some of the chocolate chips we brought back from New York.

However.  The project hit a few snags.  First, I usually use applesauce instead of oil, but I didn’t have any.  So I chopped an apple, dumped some cinnamon and sugar on it, and nuked the crap out of it (which my friend Jenny has done in the past, for sure) and then dumped it in.  And then I realized I hadn’t pureed my pumpkin very well, so I used my electric hand mixer with unusual vigor, then dumped everything into muffin cups and hoped for the best.

My optimism was misplaced.

After forty-five minutes, the muffins were still kind of flat and sad, but the edges had started to crinkle and if I left them in any longer they would burn.  The final result was more of a molten chocolate-pumpkin goo than a muffin per se.

Can you see all the space above the muffins? That’s not what they’re supposed to look like….

But gooey cups of deliciousness are an alright consolation prize:

Aaaaaand…today they are all gone.

Those of you interested in recreating this hot damn mess can get the recipe here. Just follow directions except switch oil for diced, microwaved, spiced apples.