Cheesecake Pumpkin Muffins

In our previous post about pumpkin alfredo pasta we mentioned having extra canned pumpkin on hand after making a crowd-pleasing desert. Now we'll look at how we put together these composite goodies, which combine elements of both muffins and cheesecake.

In honor of the fall season we wanted to go with pumpkin muffins, but cheesecake is a tried and true desert we can't do without, so the two got mixed together. To start these delicious stuffed treats, Megan whips up our usual cheesecake base with cream cheese, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.

There's three main components before we start assembling everything: the cheesecake filling, the dry ingredients, and the brown sugar/pumpkin mixture. The dry ingredients are standard muffin fixings including flour, sugar, and baking soda.

Next we add canned pumpkin, softened butter, crushed nuts, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger to the brown sugar and all three main components are complete.

The pumpkin/brown sugar mixture gets folded into the dry ingredients and lightly mixed.

Eventually we get this, which is essentially pumpkin bread batter and is a nice consistency partway between wet and dry.

To assemble, we place paper liners in a muffin tin and then lay down a spoonful of pumpkin batter. Next, we spoon in a layer of cheesecake filling.

Once the cheesecake filling is in, we top the muffins with another layer of pumpkin batter.

About 20 minutes of baking later, we get these beautiful, moist muffins mixing the fall flavor of pumpkin bread with the any-time deliciousness of cheesecake.

You can of course top these with fall-themed frosting, or simply top them with a mixture of brown sugar, butter, and nuts for the last few minutes of cooking.

Novel Noodles: Pumpkin Alfredo Pasta

In the full swing of the Halloween spirit, Megan recently whipped up some truly amazing pumpkin muffins filled with cheesecake. We'll be covering how to make those filled treats soon, but first we'd like to share an interesting concoction we came up with when there was some spare canned pumpkin on hand.

We've done plenty of non-traditional pastas before, and this one again stretches the boundaries of what you'd traditionally consider as ingredients for a sauce. Here we've got canned pumpkin, which is being heated on the stovetop:

While the pumpkin was cooking, we roasted a whole bulb of garlic in the oven. If you haven't done this before, chop off the top of the garlic bulb and pull off some of the papery exterior. Set the bulb in tin foil if you don't have a garlic baker, and then throw in a dab of olive oil. Once it's done baking, the cloves easily slide out of the bulb and can be easily mashed up.

Next we added the mashed garlic to the pumpkin and then added in some heavy cream, parmesan, pepper, and butter to end up with essentially an pumpkin style Alfredo sauce.

We decided to use cheese filled ravioli for our pasta, but of course anything from penne to fettuccine would work as well.

Top it all with some extra parmesan and pepper and you've got a delicious pasta dinner well off the beaten track!