Pumpkin Cheesecake Muffins

Mmmmm..... I had been thinking about making pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin mousse, etc. etc. for a while now.  Fall is finally here.  Our leaves have begun to change in upstate NY and the weather at night is getting cooler.  The sweater and riding boots have come out and I am ready for PUMPKIN!  I bookmarked and pinned A LOT of recipes, so I pulled up the first one I saw and made them today.   I don't know if I need to move on in the list of pumpkin recipes.  This one is so good and so easy that I think I will make it again!

Check these out!

The swirl of the vanilla cheesecake mixed in lightly with the spicy pumpkin batter is a perfect mix of fall goodness!  I found this recipe on instructables.com. If you are comfortable with just following the recipe, you can check mine out.  I made a few changes to the recipe and it turned out perfectly, so I will tell you that I tried to make them a little more healthy and used whole wheat flour rather than white.  I also replaced the white sugar with brown just because I had no white sugar on hand and it was delicious!

Here is a link if you would like to see the STEP by STEP tutorial. 

Here is the recipe as I made it.

Pumpkin Muffin

1- 15 oz can pumpkin

1/4 cup canola oil

2 jumbo eggs

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1-1/2 cups whole wheat flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper

Filling

8 oz cream cheese at room temperature

1 jumbo egg yolk

5 tbsp sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix pumpkin, oil and sugar together on low.  Add in eggs and vanilla and mix in.  Mix dry ingredients into wet ingredients.  Combine thoroughly and scrape the sides of the bowl until well combined.

Make the filling:

Mix together cream cheese, sugar, egg yolk and vanilla until combined.

Assemble:

Line your muffin tins with paper cups (or grease your muffin tins if you don't want to use paper cups).  Drop in spoonfuls of pumpkin mixture to fill about 1/2 way.  Add smaller spoonfuls of cream cheese mixture to top to fill the cup to about 3/4 full.  Use a skewer or spoon handle to swirl.

Bake:

Mini muffins:  20-25 minutes

Standard muffins:  25-30 minutes

Jumbo muffins:  30-40 minutes