Pumpkin Muffins with Chocolate Chips

Today we celebrated Keith's 54th birthday. If you like numbers (which I do) it was extra special as Keith was born in 1954.

For supper tonight we had many of Keith's favorite foods - a gigantic Cowboy cut steak (bone-in, of course) cooked over hard charcoal, crispy oven-baked wedges of potato, and our favorite current salad (romaine lettuce, dried cranberries, feta, and sugared sliced almonds in a white balsamic dressing), washed down with Coor's and a good single malt scotch. Dessert? Paciugo caramel sea salt and pumpkin muffins with chocolate chips. (In our new world of 80/20, where Keith succeeds (and I struggle) to eat healthy 80 percent of the time, the splurge tonight was delicious.

The recipe for pumpkin muffins with chocolate chips comes from Keith's mother Jo. Originally made as a bread, I cook the recipe in muffin tins until they're just a bit beyond custard consistency and then freeze them. Cold and with a consistency that's similar to cookie dough, in our house there's not a better treat than a frozen muffin as a snack. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients
2 cans Pumpkin
4 cups sugar
1 cup oil (corn or canola)
5 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
5 teaspoons baking soda
4 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 (16 ounce) bag chocolate chips (we like the mini-chips)

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Blend pumpkin, sugar and oil together in a large bowl.

Add flour, salt, baking soda and cinnamon and stir to combine. (I always put these ingredients into a smaller bowl and mix the salt, baking soda and cinnamon into the flour before adding it to the wet ingredients.)

Add vanilla and chocolate chips, and mix until well blended.

Portion into muffin tins (I use a scoop like the lunch ladies in Elementary schools) and bake for 20 minutes. Cool on a cooling rack and freeze.

Makes approximately 48 muffins, depending upon how much raw dough you eat.

*Note: If you prefer, portion batter into 3 medium loaf pans and bake for 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Another great thing about this recipe is that all of the ingredients are shelf stable, so you can lay in the ingredients today for baking when the mood hits sometime between now and 2011.