Filled with warm fall flavors and melty chocolate chips, these pumpkin chocolate chip muffins are sure to be a fast favorite! Not only is the taste of these muffins amazing, they are loaded with healthy ingredients! Oats, flax, pumpkin, and nut butter provide heart-healthy fiber, omega-3 fatty acids, and unsaturated fats! This is the perfect recipe to add to your weekend baking plans. 🙂
I thought it was about time for another muffin recipe! Well, I supposed we did have these mini banana loaves not too long ago, but prior to that it was all the way in mid-summer back when my garden was exploding with zucchini. While I have to admit I am really missing the warm summer weather and longer daylight, I am definitely enjoying fall baking this year. Especially now that I have this little blog this year to share my recipes with you!
So confession. Growing up, I (thought) I hated pumpkin and pumpkin spice flavors. I was (and still am) a die-hard chocolate lover. However, I honestly just never really gave pumpkin flavors a chance. And pumpkin WITH chocolate?! Sold. Obviously, anything with chocolate is sure to be a popular recipe.
If you remember WAY back to these banana oat muffins, this recipe is similar using ground oats (aka oat flour) as the base. I adore the taste, texture, nutritional value, and price of oats and use them in many ways quite often!
Ingredients and Substitutions
Just a note, I haven’t tried this recipe with other flours but it is SO simple to make homemade oat flour. Just simply add oats (quick or old-fashioned) into your blender (or food processor), and blend until a fine flour forms! Quick, cheap, and easy. I have also not tested this recipe using an egg in place of the ground flax, but you could likely substitute that (you may want to use ¼ cup milk instead of 1/3 cup though if using an egg instead of ground flax). The pumpkin and nut butter also act as binders in this recipe.
While I personally wouldn’t recommend omitting the chocolate chips, as the muffins don’t contain much sugar at all (just ¼ cup pure maple syrup in the entire batch!), you could try substituting chopped nuts, dried cranberries, chopped dates, etc. in place of the chocolate chips.
Hope you love this recipe! 🙂
P.S. Since this batter didn’t contain any raw eggs (it happens to be vegan if you’re using dairy-free chocolate chips), I MAY have taste-tested it. 😉 So you may get closer to 12 muffins instead of 11 like I did!
- 2 cups oats, ground into oat flour (measured BEFORE grinding into oat flour)
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 cup 100% pure pumpkin puree
- 2 tablespoons ground flax
- ⅓ cup milk
- ¼ cup pure maple syrup
- ½ cup cashew or almond butter
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- ½ cup mini chocolate chips
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease muffin pan with nonstick cooking spray.
- Add 2 cups oats to blender or food processor. Process until oats become a fine flour-like texture and set aside in medium-size bowl. Add in baking soda, baking powder, salt, pumpkin pie spice, and cinnamon to ground oats.
- In separate bowl, mix together pumpkin puree, ground flax, milk, maple syrup, nut butter, and vanilla. Pour wet ingredients into dry and stir gently until combined. Gently fold in chocolate chips.
- Using an ice cream scoop (I find this to be the easiest and least messy way), divide batter evenly in muffin pan.
- Bake at 350 degrees about 18-22 minutes; mine took 21 minutes. Makes 11 muffins.
What a perfect combination! I need to bake these for my grand children!
Thank you! I’m sure your grandchildren will love them! 🙂