Whole Wheat Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

As part of the baking Day frenzy on Wednesday several people were making Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins. Since I had a large can of pumpkin left from last year that I really wanted to use up I decided to use part of it for some of these muffins.  I looked at several other recipes but some of the proportions sounded off to me.  So I took some info from them, lightened up on the spices so as not to offend my children, combined it with the proportions I knew from this Banana Chocolate Chip recipe to come up with my own Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffin Recipe. Sometimes improvisation works!So here is

Unfinished Mom's Whole Wheat Pumpkin 

Chocolate Chip Muffins

(printable recipe)

Ingredients (in order of use):

• 1 ½ Cup Whole Wheat flour
• 1 Cup Unbleached all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp cloves
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 Cup pumpkin puree (I used canned)
• 1 egg
• ½ Cup ¾ Cup milk
• ¼ Cup canola oil
• ½ Cup sugar
• ¾ Cup chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375°.
   
2. In a medium size bowl, combine flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, spices.
   
3. In small bowl whisk pumpkin puree, egg, milk, oil and sugar together.
   
4. Combine dry and wet ingredients.
5. Fold in chocolate chips
   
6. Grease muffin tins. Fill tins 2/3 full (~1/4 cup each).
7. Place muffin tin in oven. Raise oven temperature to 400°. (Here's why.) Bake ~20 17 minutes.
8. Turn out of tins immediately onto clean dishtowel. **SEE NOTE BELOW!
   

Notes:
Makes 12 muffins.
These freeze well.
For the future I think I'll only use 1 Cup Whole Wheat flour; this batch was a tad on the dry side and I'm hoping to get a smoother top as well. (see update below!)
** Use an clean old dishtowel. These muffins will leave orange circles on your dishtowel.

The general muffin recipe found in the Tightwad Gazette is very helpful in creating your own muffin recipe, like this one.

Have a suggestion for making these a bit more moist and smoother on the top?

Updated 12/7/09: I've played around with how to make this a moister muffin and settled on these revisions: same amount of flour, but more milk and less baking time. I updated the ingredients list above to to match these revisions.


You can find more great recipes at: 
Cupcake Tuesday @ Hoosier Homemade

Tempt My Tummy @ Blessed With Grace
Tasty Tuesday @ Balancing Beauty and Bedlam
Tuesdays at the Table @ All the Small Stuff