Pumpkin muffins are an Inn on Main Street specialty

They’re chewy and definitely not your bakery-bought fluffy muffins. Inn on Main Street’s from-scratch pumpkin muffins, which are a whole lot like our sweet potato muffins, always are a favorite.

In mountain culture, there’s hog-slaughtering time when the frost comes. Since we don’t serve any variations of hog meat here at the inn, I think of it as pumpkin-slaughtering time in Weaverville. We cut up the pumpkins we put out for Halloweeen (but didn’t carve), and bake the chunks until the flesh is soft. We run the peeled chunks through the grater blade on the food processor and put up several bags of frozen pumpkin pulp, enough to make muffins and pumpkin bisque until the daffodils bloom. Yum.

The Grove Park Inn in Asheville has its gingerbread house tours around Christmas. Our own tradition is to put the ginger into something fun to eat.

I tend to use a lot of fruit in any muffins I make, so they tend to be pretty dense and chewy. Guests seem to like that, though I’m sure it would shock Betty Crocker. In any case, here’s one of the most requested recipes from Inn on Main Street.

Measurement and ingredient list (in order of use):

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup mashed pumpkin

1 Tbsp. unsulfured molasses

1 tsp. pure vanilla

2 tsp. ground ginger

1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp. ground cloves

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1/2 cup canola oil

1 egg

1 cup buttermilk

2 cups white unbleached all-purpose flour

Mix brown sugar, pumpkin pulp, molasses, vanilla and dry ingredients except flour. Mix in oil, egg and buttermilk. Add flour and mix as little as possible to blend ingredients. Spoon batter into muffin tins sprayed with vegetable oil. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes or until tops brown. Makes about a dozen muffins.

Let me know if this works out for you. Email dan@innonmain.com or visit us on Facebook.