Pumpkin Cranberry Muffins

These delicious pumpkin cranberry muffins are made with pumpkin puree and fresh cranberries. Pumpkin puree makes them super moist and adds amazing flavor. Fresh and tart cranberries are balancing the sweetness. These muffins are really amazing, light, fluffy, and so beautifully colored!

Ingredients

Here’s what you need to make these delicious pumpkin cranberry muffins:

• Pumpkin puree – you can make this recipe with homemade pumpkin puree or canned puree. I would really recommend making your own pumpkin puree – it’s so easy to make and the difference in flavor is HUGE (quick instructions are below). Store-bought pumpkin puree is thicker so if you’re using that, add an additional tablespoon of milk to the recipe.
• Standard muffin recipe ingredients such as egg, milk, flour, vanilla extract, baking powder, sugar, salt.
• Oil – I’m using oil instead of butter in this recipe. Oil makes muffins super moist and there’s just enough flavor here so the butter is not needed in my opinion, but if you’d like, you could substitute oil with melted butter.
• Orange zest – orange flavor goes so well with pumpkin.
• A touch of cinnamon – to complement the pumpkin flavor, but it’s not overwhelming here.
• Fresh cranberries – they add a touch of sweetness, tartness, and moisture. They also look so pretty in these muffins! You could also use dried but it would just not be the same. You would also need to soak dried muffins in orange juice before adding them to the batter, otherwise, dry cranberries would soak up moisture from the muffin batter. Don’t try to add more fresh cranberries to the batter – the muffins would be too tart.

How to make homemade pumpkin puree

Wash the pumpkin, cut it into large chunks. Place pumpkin pieces on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake for about 20 minutes at 400°F (200°C / Gas Mark 6), or until tender. Scoop out the seeds using a spoon (you can discard the skin and seeds) and puree until smooth. A have a separate detailed post with photos about that: how to make pumpkin puree.

If you have a food processor and roasted pumpkin chunks, the preparation is even simpler!

Throw the roasted pumpkin chunks into the food processor along with the other wet ingredients (an immersion/hand blender can also be used), pulse until smooth, then add the dry ingredients, pulse very briefly until just combined.

Toppings for pumpkin muffins

• you can make them without any topping – they’re delicious
• crunchy sugar tops – just sprinkle the tops with light brown or turbinado (raw) sugar
• sprinkle them with cinnamon sugar: 3 tablespoons light brown sugar + 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• sugary cinnamon nut topping: 2 tablespoons brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/3 cup chopped walnuts (40g)
• make cinnamon crumble: simply combine 5 tablespoons flour (45g), 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 cup light brown sugar (50g), and 2 tablespoons soft butter (30g).

Before you start

This recipe is very forgiving and easy to measure with measuring cups but I would like to just bring to your attention how I measure flour. 1 cup of flour can weigh 120-150g, depending on how you’re filling your cup. I’m using the “spoon and level method” so 1 cup of flour in my recipes weighs 125g.

If you are measuring your flour by dipping the measuring cup in the flour container it is very possible that your cup of flour will weigh 140-150g (scooping the flour directly into the measuring cup compacts it so you have more flour in your cup).

Adding too much flour will result in dry muffins so please use my method of measuring flour or use a kitchen scale for a perfect result every time (you don’t have to weigh all the ingredients, just the flour, all the other ingredients are fine to measure with cups!).

To correctly measure the flour, you need to:

1. Fluff the flour by stirring it in the bag/flour container with a spoon.
2. Spoon the flour and sprinkle it into your measuring cup.
3. Sweep off the excess flour with the back of a knife.

Step by step instructions

Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C / Gas Mark 4), no fan.

STEP 1: In a medium bowl, whisk all the dry ingredients.

STEP 2: In a large bowl, whisk all the wet ingredients together until smooth.

STEP 3: Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, whisk until just combined, don‘t overmix the batter, small lumps are ok.

STEP 4: Divide the batter evenly between 10 muffin liners.

STEP 5: Add 5 cranberries to each muffin, press the cranberries into the batter using a teaspoon (they don’t have to be completely covered with batter.

STEP 6: Bake for about 20 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. The baking time may slightly vary, depending on the oven.

Cool on a rack for 10 minutes.

Enjoy!

Decorate these muffins for Halloween

If you want to decorate these muffins for Halloween, you can make a spiders’ web design with cocoa icing. It’s of course optional, the muffins will also taste amazing without it.

To make the cocoa icing, whisk together: 5 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder (sifted), 5 tablespoons powdered sugar (sifted), and 3 1/2 tablespoons water.

This icing tastes like dark chocolate. If you want it to be sweeter, you can replace a part of the cocoa powder with powdered sugar. You will need a very small round cake decorating tip and a thick plastic zip lock bag (or a special cake decorating kit). Cut a small hole in the corner of the plastic bag, push the tip through. Fill the bag with icing and decorate. If the icing doesn‘t come out easily through the tip, you need to thin out the icing by adding additional water to it (but very little!).

To make spider’s web on top of the muffins: draw a few circles on top with the cocoa icing, use a toothpick to draw the lines from the center to the edge to create a spider’s web design.

Storage

These muffins will keep for up to 3 days. You can store them at room temperature in a tightly closed container.

More muffin recipes

• blueberry yogurt muffins (best blueberry muffins!)
• mango muffins
• raspberry white chocolate muffins
• pear muffins

Did you make this recipe? Let me know how you liked it and give it a star rating in the comments below! You can also add a photo of your creation!