Hey, #cooking people! The pumpkin muffins came out okayish - I used @darth_hideout 's recipe for the pumpkin spice and it was excellent - but I feel they could use more workshopping.
Two issues:
1) They kinda didn't ever seem to be done, so we gave up and ate them still kind of mushy inside. We exceeded the indicated time baking by like 20 minutes (though with multiple oven door openings to check). Now, these are not conventional muffins, which is one reason why we were baking them and not just buying them. The ingredients were 2 cups rolled oats; 1 cup pumpkin puree; 1 cup milk; 1/3 cup maple syrup; 2 eggs; 1 teaspoon vanilla extract; 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice; 1 teaspoon baking soda; ¼ teaspoon salt. So this wasn't going to have a normal texture. But still, I think they were supposed to wind up more consistently...cooked.
Unlike the original instructions, we didn't pour the batter directly into greased tins; we used cupcake papers in disposable aluminum muffin tins. Did this affect the cooking time?
AFAIK, the oven is very reasonably calibrated, and we haven't had any trouble baking anything else.
Not sure what else could have caused this. Open to suggestions.
2) They came out too healthy tasting. Mr Bostoniensis is threatening to just slather the next batch with canned frosting, but I think that will overwhelm the pumpkin spice flavor. I think they would be improved by some sort of crunchy sugary cinnamony topping, maybe with chopped pecans. Does anybody have a recipe for something like that? Low effort/high ease counts for a lot here because, well, it's competing with just buying canned frosting.
