Cubicle kitchen: Dark Harvest Muffins

Last week was all about back to school, with my movie review and inspiration.  It was also the main reasoning behind the baked good I brought in for klatch.  The logic was this: the start of the school year means the end of summer, which means the start of fall, which means that I get to use all of the warm spice flavors of fall that I love.

Not that there's any law against pumpkin and cinnamon in the springtime, but it makes me self-conscious to shirk the cultural norms like that.  But now I need not fear the stares, pointing and snickering of my paranoid imagination, because even though we're still hitting triple digit highs, there is at least one way in which it's beginning to feel a lot like fall.  So it can also taste like it.

So there's my excuse for baking them.  And because I specialize in getting people to eat treats, here are just a few of the healthy excuses for eating them:

• Hey, the flour is whole wheat, that's good for me, right?
• Corn meal means there's not as much of that evil gluten.
• Those dark chocolate chips are are like little bites of antioxidant magic.
• Come on, it's pumpkin.  You got your vitamins, your fiber, and bonus antioxidants to boot.
• The mini ones are so small, you can have two!

Dark Harvest Muffins
Recipe from PBS Kitchen Explorers: Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Corn Muffins

My notes:

• I used Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate Chips, and what I would call a generous cup (more like 1 1/4-1/2)
• This made 56 mini-muffins and a dozen regular-sized muffins
• The mini-muffins take about 10-12 minutes in the oven.
• If you care about how your muffins look, you'll want to scoop them prettily into the paper cups, because they won't rise into a lovely cupcake-like mound on their own.  They'll still be yummy, though.