Cooking (and baking) with Dr. Monkey

Today's episode, cream cheese pumpkin muffins with streusel topping.

We grew pumpkins and watermelon in our front yard this year. The watermelon, moon and stars variety, grew okay but they didn't get big and they were seedy as hell and not very sweet at all. However the pumpkins were a smashing success. We grew this variety:
Calm down those of you who don't grow gardens, yes, that's a pumpkin and not all pumpkins are roundish and orange, just like not all carrots are orange and not all potatoes are white. We used one pumpkin already to make pumpkin ravioli and pumpkin soup, so I decided to cook this pumpkin up and use it in some baked dishes. First I cut it up and peeled it. Then I cut it into smallish chunks and I tossed all if it in a pot and covered it with water:
I boiled it until all the pieces were soft and then I put the soft pieces in the food processor and I pulsed the hell out of them. This is what I ended up with:
You can't tell from the photo but that's a pretty good sized mixing bowl, I'd say I ended up with about 6 to 8 cups of cooked pumpkin.

Yesterday I looked up pumpkin recipes online and I found this one for cream cheese pumpkin muffins. I followed it to the letter except where it called for olive oil, I used canola oil. And I followed the advice of the first commenter who said to make the cream cheese filling a little differently then they call for in the main recipe. Oh, I also used fat free cream cheese, which made the recipe lower over all in fat.

I have to say for a guy who doesn't do much baking, that's Sparky's thing, I cook, she bakes, this recipe was easy to follow. Here's what my muffins looked like before I baked them:
And here they are after 25ish minutes in the oven at 375F:
I had quite a bit of batter left over, enough for about a half a dozen more muffins but I ended up tossing it. They muffins are pretty darn tasty and they are fluffy and moist. I'd definitely make this recipe again but next time I may make it as a cake and make a fat free cream and streusel frosting to go on top of it.

I've got more pumpkin left over so I'll probably make pumpkin/banana bread in the next few days and I'll stick it in the freezer.