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!