Super Simple Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

Marc — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 16:00:00 +0000

I love me a simple recipe. Especially when it comes to baking because I am not as well versed in that compared with cooking. Though I have been improving: see my buttermilk biscuits and Irish soda bread. However, my wife taught me to make these super simple pumpkin chocolate chip muffins.

Because it was something that I couldn’t mess up.

And I promise, it really is that easy.

They are a very dense kind of muffin. Plus they are stuffed with chocolate chips. To the rafters. Just look at that photo. So if you aren’t into chocolate chips then you might need to move along from this recipe…

So get ready for a hearty, heavy muffin that will satisfy all of your sweet fall cravings.

Making Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

Only three ingredients make up the entire recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip muffins.

A boxed cake mix, a can of pumpkin, and lots of chocolate chips. Plus a muffin tin and some liners in which to bake them.

Just stir them all together to get a dense kind of batter (though I recommend doing just the pumpkin and cake mix first, then adding the chocolate chips). You will then have to spoon the mixture into the muffin tin. Just approximate how much you want in each liner.

It isn’t an exact science.

But do note that they will look very similar to however they are spooned in. The batter doesn’t settle to the bottom of the cupcake liner and then puff up as many other muffins would.

They kind of just bake in place, as they are. You can see by comparing my spooned-out muffins below to the recipe card photo of the pumpkin chocolate chip muffins on the cooling rack.

And one of the greatest parts of the simplicity of this recipe is that all of the ingredients can be sitting in your pantry. They are shelf-stable for a fairly long time so that you can make it whenever the craving strikes.

The Cake Mix

My wife would always make this recipe using a spice cake mix as the base.

But this time around we could not manage to find one anywhere. Between three different stores and five total visits, spice cake mix was nowhere to be found.

And so my wife bought a couple of carrot cake mixes to test out.

Wouldn’t you know, the carrot cake mix still worked. There’s a slight difference in taste and I think I do still prefer the original spice cake mix. I think the spice cake flavor makes it that much more of a fall-flavored treat.

So in the recipe, I do still recommend using a boxed spice cake mix. But you can clearly experiment with other flavors and see what happens. Funfetti pumpkin chocolate chip muffins. German chocolate. Butter pecan?!

Let me know in the comments how it goes if you experiment.