{ Pumpkin Cranberry Muffins With Yummy Filling }

BTW:(I have made these again and used cane sugar and pecans and replaced the buttermilk with the same amount of sour cream..this time...even moister and 100 times more DELISH!!)

I carved another pumpkin at my sister Jeannie's last night while rumps schemed all night to get the sharpest tool we had. We sipped pumpkin coffee while sister carved a bat and moon scene that had a difficulty level of 2 pumpkins. Strangely our pumpkins were about 2-3 inches thick and resembled cutting into a pair of loafers. I did a cute polka dot design around the middle via queen Martha's website, that came out really cool. I ended up with all these cute circles of pumpkin so I wanted to keep them and figure out a recipe to incorporate them. I had a version of these as cookies while pumpkin picking last fall! I found the filling on cooks.com and the muffin recipe is an old recipe and I just added the cranberries & molasses to spice it up. These muffins are so moist and pumpkin-y it is plain silly. The cranberries add a bittersweet bite and great fall color to these tasty cakes.
Fresh pumpkin and the creamy surprise of the sweetened cream cheese filling inside is to die for.


For Muffins:
2 cups roasted fresh pumpkin puree or a 15oz. can of pumpkin puree
1/2 cup sweetened cranberries
4 eggs
½ cup vegetable oil
½ cup butter
2/3 cup sour cream
2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup chopped roughly pecans
1 teaspoon molasses
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 t teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

Filling:
8 oz. Cream Cheese
¼ Cup Evaporated Cane Juice
1/8 Tsp salt
½ Tsp Lemon juice
1 Egg

Cream together the cream cheese, sugar, salt and lemon juice. Mix in one egg until smooth. Whisk in the flour until smoothly combined and place in pastry piping bag; promptly refrigerate to firm up the mixture. This can be done ahead of time.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Line two muffin/cup cake pans; spray with flour and oil or just oil (which ever you have).

In a large bowl, mix together pumpkin puree, eggs, butter, oil, buttermilk, molasses and sugar until well blended. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger.
Stir the dry ingredients into the pumpkin mixture until just blended.

Pour about 2 tablespoons of the batter into each muffin cup. Pipe about 1 tablespoon of the cream cheese mixture into the center of the prepared cups. Spoon another 1 1/2 -2 tablespoons of the batter on top of the cream cheese, just enough to cover the cheese mixture, it must not be showing when the pans go into the oven.

Sprinkle the tops with coarse sugar, if you want to, this is not necessary-just tasty.

Bake for about 30-40 minutes in the preheated oven. Muffins are done when toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.