Special thanks to Angie Sharp for letting me use her beautiful picture!
I don’t know if pumpkin is a southern thing. You always hear of pumpkin pie on Southern tables at Thanksgiving and such, but no one in my family has ever made a pumpkin pie to my knowledge. I had never tasted anything at all with pumpkin until about three years ago. While on a quilting retreat, we were served these delicious spice muffins and I just had to have the recipe. Imagine my surprise (and Mama’s) when we found out they were pumpkin!
You see, Mama had always claimed to dislike anything pumpkin. She had tried pumpkin pie as a child and whenever we asked about it she would just shake her head and say “Its kind of slimy, trust me, you wouldn’t like it”. Of course, we took her word for it, and each one of us grew up to be avowed pumpkin dislikers as well. You know, I’m pretty sure “disliker” is not a word but it makes perfect sense in that sentence, doesn’t it? See, the English language just needs to keep up with me and we’ll all be better off.
Anyway, as it turns out, Mama must have gotten a hold of a bad piece of pumpkin pie as a child because we have both broadened our horizons with regards to pumpkin since that muffin incident and it is now a regular part in our holiday baking, as well as year round baking thanks to these muffins.
No, these aren’t the ones we had on retreat. They are actually better except for one thing – those on the retreat were baked for us, you have to bake these yourself. Everything tastes better when someone else cooks it for you!
A neighbor of a friend gave me this recipe when I was telling her about the muffins. She was of the Northern persuasion and, thinking pumpkin was a Northern thing at the time, I asked her if she happened to know how to make pumpkin muffins.
Her face immediately lit up with glee at getting to pass this recipe on to one more person and now I share that glee in passing it on to you. To quote the person who first gave it to me…”If you want to make the BEST pumpkin muffins on earth…”
Oooh ooh! The best part…I added the streusel topping from Grandmama’s Sweet Potato Casseroleto them! They were good before but now – WOW! Tastes like something you’d get in a coffee shop. Go ahead, impress someone with your culinary skill today. Just make sure you hide the cake mix box in the very bottom of your trash can. Putting a few crumpled paper towels on top of it wouldn’t hurt, either.
Ingredients
For the Muffins:
- 1 box spice cake mix
- 1 can pumpkin
- 1/2 cup water
For the Topping:
- 1 Cup Brown Sugar
- 1/2 Cup Stick Margarine or butter
- 1 Cup Flour
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 12 cup muffin tin.
- In mixing bowl, place all ingredients. Mix until well blended. Scoop into muffin tin.
- For the topping, stir together flour and brown sugar, breaking up any lumps. Cut in butter or margarine. Spoon or sprinkle on top of muffins, pat down slightly.
- Bake at 350 for 20-24 minutes.
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Yum 
Wunderbar! These look yummy!
these are yummy!!!! Easy to make too.
~hands you a muffin~
Have y’all seen “Enchanted”? Every time I make something like this I hand it to my kids and imitate the little chipmunk..”Want some? Its goood!”
hehe
Christy 🙂
Y’all need to see that movie, we just loved it. Its hilarious for adults as well as kids and has that grey’s anatomy guy everyone loves so much.
Those do look fantastic, Christy. They would be lower fat than regular mix-made muffins except for the streusal. But who would want to miss THAT!?
As long as you are the cake mix kick, try this one: 1 box devils food or chocolate fudge cake mix and 1 can of the coconut/pecan frosting you would use for german chocolate cake. Make the cake by the directions on the box but stir in the frosting before you put the batter in a prepared bundt pan. Bake like the box says. Amazing how moist and delish this is.
This is the recipe I use for donating a cake for fall festival at church, bake sales, etc., except I use the really dark fudge cake mix. When it’s done, I sprinkle it with powdered sugar which looks great on the dark cake. Put on a piece of foil covered cardboard, cover with clear wrap, and it’s usually one of the first to go at bake sales. It is really good.
I made this yesterday, oh my goodness!
Thank you for putting this easy easy recipe up here, the only thing I did different was to add a glaze after it cooled off.
Only two ingredients! Brilliant!
I love Enchanted! Such a cute movie. This looks so good! I have made cupcakes with chocolate cake mix and pumpkin before and they are so moist and delicious. And this just sounds even better…especially with the yummy topping! 🙂
I’m not a fan of Pumpkin but these look good. With only two ingredients I couldn’t screw it up too bad haha.
These look great. I am not a pumpkin pie person, but I love anything baked with pumpkin. I can’t wait to try these.
These look wonderful! I planned to make pumpkin bread this afternoon but I think I will change my plan and try these muffins after picking up a cake mix.
I just made a cake last night that’s almost the same! One box yellow cake mix, one can pumpkin. Mix and bake for a half hour, then topped with a glaze made from apple cider, powdered sugar, and pumpkin pie spice. Fabulous fabulous find, I was just going to make the cake again but now I may have to try these muffins!
I’ve made these before without the topping. I bet that just makes them even better!
Love the topping. I often use pumpkin mixed in cake mix. It makes it so moist. Pumpkin tastes great in chocoalte cake mix too!
grats little treat Christy! I love pumpkin
These look dee-lish, and something that I could actually handle!
P.S. Not only are your posts informative, but funny!
these turned out great!!! So easy and sooo moist.
Am making this right now…smell great.
Can they be frozen?
I learned about the muffins like this in a weight watchers meeting.
minis the toppins, it was 1 pt. for each muffin.
yum yum! It fills you up too!
Christy, what size is the can of pumpkin? It looks like an average 14.5oz can in the photo but I’ve got 29oz in my cupboard. Maybe I need to make a double batch and surprise the kids. 🙂
Well…well….I see there are some changes around here…lol!
This is the last post that has shown up in my google reader…I got a little concerned and finally clicked and found you had a new set up…Oh my…I had some catching up to do…darn Google reader anyhow!!
You are the new “semi-homemade” gal. =)
another real good recipe using spice cake mix to put a can of apple pie mix on the bottom of a baking dish, sprinkle the cake mix on that and pour melted of butter on top of that. bake that and YUM!! Top with vanilla ice cream.
Wait a minute DRY cake mix and butter on the pie filling, that’s it????
OMG, I LOVE this web site!!!
Is it the 29 oz can of pumpkin or the 15 oz can I made a batch with the 15 oz can but they can be hard to find after Thanksgiving. and
its hard to tell in the photo what size can. My kids love these muffins. and to make it easy I use a ice cream scoop (you know the old ones with the wire to help pop them out) to measure the amount to go in the cup. and the scoop that I use for cookie dough works great with the mini muffin pans and lets face it kids love anything mini.
Good golly Miss Molly!!! These sound super duper wonderfully delicious!!!! I’m going to have to have my granddaughter make some of these when she comes to visit tomorrow for a few days!! I only hope she eats a lot of them cuz I know I could and I shouldn’t!!! I’m diabetic – might be ok to eat one without that fabulous topping, tho!! This is the kind of thing that makes me want to sneak out into the kitchen in the middle of the night for “just one more little bite!” Yeah, right – it’s the whole muffin or nothin’!!!
Another way to do this is with a Devil’s Food cake mix and a can of pumpkin! The kiddies will never know what hit them, because you can’t taste the pumpkin! Just a wonderful, moist, chocolate muffin! =)
Christy, I am sitting here bored while I’m waiting for my hubby and son to get home, so I thought I’d read the recipes that I haven’t read before and girl u are making me soooo hungry! I am going to have to make this one! It is soooo freakin’ easy! I think my 1 year old could do it!…lol…definitly gonna be making these this week!
Keep up the yummy good work, girl!
Vickie
I’m finally making these now and just licking the bowl, OH MY GOODNESS. Can’t wait to eat them. Thank you so much for a simple recipe. I’m now a big baker but I think I can handle this one! YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY
My Daughter made these while I was visiting. We loved them, they were so moist that when we took some of the muffin top off (not the extra topping) we noticed that it ws so moist it was like eating pumpkin pie even though the muffin did not look wet.
Just made these tonight and they are so yummy! I put some aside to give to my mom and my husband told me not to give them away, he wanted more for himself! So easy and so moist!
What a way to start my day–with your musings! I love to sit down in the a.m. with my first cup of coffee and open my email to find a “little love from Southern Plate”! I just got up and took a stick of butter out of the fridge to soften for later. Anna Jane and I will be making these this afternoon. Ya’ll heard of the advent calendars that countdown the days until Christmas? Well, I made one for Halloween that has strips of paper in the boxes with fun activities (camp out in living room, nature walk, etc.)—-today’s said, “Bake something with Mommy”. Guess what we’re making??????
I love using the cake mix + pumpkin trick! Especially in the spice cake mix, so yumtastic! I’ve not tried it with a streusel topping tho….need to get on that asap!
I have the muffins in the oven and the batter alone is so good. I can’t wait for them to be done!
I just made these and they were delicious and super easy. The only problem I had was the topping but beside that they were PERFECT!