Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Pumpkin (Kabocha) Muffins

 
As I mentioned yesterday, autumn is here! There are many things that I LOVE about autumn - the colors, football, and food. Pumpkins, apples, turkey, sweet potatoes, the list could go on and on really. I had been craving some pumpkin the other day and as luck would have it, Alton Brown's Pumpkin Bread recipe came to my inbox that very same day! Apparently the cooking gods were smiling down on me.
 
The recipe includes baking time for changing these into muffins, so I was decided to go down that route. It is really difficult to find the big, orange pumpkins that we get in the US and when you are lucky enough to come across them, they are usually outrageously expensive. We do, however, have a squash - kabocha - that is fairly similar, but smaller and green on the outside. I figured it would be close enough and just went with it.
 
The first step was to toast the seeds. The recipe calls for 1 cup, but by the end of gutting a kabocha I only ended up with about 1/3 cup.  
 

 
I mixed the batter up (minus the seeds) and dropped it into the cupcake tins. After I got 12 of them ready, I put the seeds in and filled up another eight. I saved a few seeds and put them on the top so I could easily tell which were with and which were without. Twenty in all and we were ready to go!
 

In the end, they were pretty tasty. But, I found out the difference between pumpkin and kabocha: kabocha seeds don't ever soften. After toasting they were still super hard, but I thought they might soften up during the baking. No such luck. They are super hard and make the muffins a tad difficult to eat. Luckily I only put them into eight of the muffins. The other 12 are delish!
 


No comments:

Post a Comment