Foodie Friday – The Perfect Cream Cheese Muffin

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Every year when fall rolls around, most people look forward to Starbucks PSL. Me? I immediately crave a pumpkin cream cheese muffin… the PCCM! But at 420 calories and nearly $3 bucks a piece, I had to find an alternative to my favorite fall treat.

Thanks to the internet, I found a great copycat recipe at Annie’s Eats. This muffin tastes a lot like like the Starbucks version. The only problem though is that there are a ton of steps including the one I always forgot when I went to make them which includes rolling out and freezing the cream cheese mixture for 2 hours before you use it in the muffins. Ahhhhh! When I want a pumpkin cream cheese muffin, I want it now and that 2 hour wait always frustrates me.

So now that a new fall season is here (and I’ve already had two Starbucks cream cheese muffins!!) I went looking for a new copycat recipe and I found it at Crazy for Crust. This muffin is so good and more importantly, my husband and I were eating them in less than half an hour!

So here’s what you need:

  • sugar
  • vegetable oil
  • pumpkin puree
  • eggs
  • milk
  • pumpkin pie spice
  • salt
  • baking soda
  • flour

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Follow these easy steps:

Stir together the pumpkin, oil and sugar in a bowl. Don’t use a mixer.

Then stir in the eggs, pumpkin pie spice, salt and baking soda.

Be sure you sift the flour so you don’t get any lumps in your batter.

Then add half of the flour to your pumpkin mixture, the milk and then the other half of the flour.

Fill the muffin cups halfway. The recipe says it makes 18 muffins but I didn’t want to put another batch in the oven (another timesaver) so I just filled my 12 muffin cups a little fuller. You may notice I do not have any muffin liners in my muffin pan. This pan does not need them if you can believe that. But that’s a whole other post! Bottom line, don’t forget your muffin liners if you are using a traditional muffin pan.

Next, mix the ingredients for the cream cheese filling

Drop a tablespoon on top of each muffin.

Bake for 15 minutes. I left mine in an extra 5 because they were bigger. After that, let them cool for at least 5 minutes in the pan.

Then… enjoy!

My husband and I really loved these muffins even better than the ones that took a lot of prep work. Although they don’t look like Starbucks muffins, they tasted just as good. They definitely were more moist than the Starbucks version. I also loved all the cream cheese filling. I always felt Starbucks never put enough of that goodness in there and I could just pile it on.

One last thing… when it comes to calories, there’s really no comparison. Like I said, the muffin Starbucks sells has 420 calories. The one that I made has 235 calories and that’s because I only made 12. If you made 18 muffins, you would cut the calorie count down to just 157!

For the complete recipe, head on over to Dorothy’s blog at Crazy for Crust.

Now that you know my favorite fall treat, what’s yours?

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Emily
The last few years have brought big changes for Emily. After spending years in high-stress, deadline-driven TV jobs in East Coast metros, family circumstances brought her and her husband Joel to the Arizona desert. Now this former news junkie is a stay-at-home mom to Miles, a fast-talking toddler with energy to spare. She spends her days teaching him about faith, letters, numbers and manners. Whenever he’s asleep she boots up the laptop to write for North Phoenix Moms Blog and other freelance gigs. Whatever spare time she has left is spent on a hike with her family or a rare date night with Joel, at the gym, coffee and dinner with friends, or in her craft room creating simple, beautiful jewelry for her online boutique, Hazel & May, and giving too many treats to her pups, Pepper and Gizmo.

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