My tradition in recent years has been to bake muffins for Valentine's Day. When my children were younger, I would bake and decorate heart-shaped cupcakes, or even make a two-layer cake in special pans. But now there are too many of us keeping an eye on our sugar intake, so I bake reduced-sugar muffins instead. They disappear rapidly.
Today I used a recipe for Easy Pumpkin Muffins, which can be found here. I cut both sugars in half, and used a scant 2 cups of homegrown baked squash that had been run through the Foley food mill. It's a rare day when a recipe calling for pumpkin actually contains pumpkin at my house. I can grow winter squash (Bon Bon and Red Kuri are two favorites), but pumpkins usually don't have enough time to mature in our short growing season. Somehow @generikat pulls it off, but her house is at a lower elevation, and I am going to use that as a reason/excuse.
I highly recommend this recipe. I suggest you check them after 15 minutes, just to be on the safe side. My heart-shaped pans needed only 16 minutes, but the regular muffin pans required 20-22 minutes.
Happy baking and eating!
Ha ha ha! Yes it's totally my 200 feet in lower elevation that makes the difference, I totally approve of that excuse! 🤣
Those heart shaped muffins do look especially scrumptious, I've found that winter squash seems to be pretty interchangeable in baked goods, or maybe it's just that I like baked goods made with winter squash that I don't care what type is in the comestible. Yep, gonna go with that!
I'm glad you like my theory. Heh heh.
I will give it a try
Happy Valentines :)
I hope you like them!
Ah yes, we used to have sweet potato pie instead of pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. It really tastes about the same.
My daughter made a sweet potato pie once. It was quite tasty.