Libby Klein: Please join me in giving a warm kitchen welcome to our guest chef and my delightful friend - Darci Hannah.
Darci Hannah: Hi Libby, thanks for inviting me to be a guest on Mystery Lovers Kitchen today! Being a food lover, I’m so excited to be here to share a recipe. I think it’s pretty awesome that we both have Halloween cozy mysteries out now, and both of our books contain delicious recipes. I don’t know about you, but I always have a lot of fun testing out recipes for my novels. Since my main character, Lindsey Bakewell, is a baker and owns a bakery in a lighthouse, I feel some pressure to include truly delicious recipes for baked goods that can hopefully be replicated and enjoyed at home. Sometimes the recipes I try flop or seem too difficult to bother making at home. Those get booted out early in the process. Then there are those recipes that are not only delicious but easy to throw together. Those are the ones I enjoy the most—a great recipe that doesn’t take all afternoon to make!
Since Murder at the Pumpkin Pageant is a Halloween mystery, I really wanted to include some of my favorite recipes for pumpkin baked goods. The one I’m sharing today is for pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and they are one of my favorite go-to fall recipes. This particular recipe came from a little muffin book my mom gave me for a wedding shower gift back in the late 1980s. My mom is a huge cookbook collector and always loves to find interesting or regional recipe books to give as gifts. Lucky me! There were a lot of great muffin recipes in the book for not only sweet muffins but savory ones as well. However, I quickly homed in on the recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, and I’m not sorry I did. They’re perfect for breakfast, a late afternoon snack, or even dessert. And they go really well with a mug of hot, rich black coffee. My family loves them, and I hope you do too.
Pumpkin
Chocolate Chip Muffins
Prep time: 15 minutes. Bake time: 20-25 minutes. Makes
12 regular-size muffins.
Ingredients:
1 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar, and more for sprinkling
1 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1 cup pumpkin puree
½ cup (1 stick) butter, melted and cooled
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
Directions:
Heat oven to 350° F. Grease or line muffin pan. In a
large mixing bowl combine flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
Whisk all the dry ingredients together.
In a smaller bowl, add pumpkin puree, eggs, pumpkin
spice, and melted butter.
Whisk until blended.
Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients and
gently fold in with a rubber spatula just until all the batter is combined. Do
not overmix. Stir in the chocolate chips.
.
Place about ¼ cup of batter in each muffin cup.
Sprinkle a little sugar on the top of each one. Bake in a preheated oven for 20-25 minutes, or until done.
Cool and serve. Enjoy!
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It’s Halloween weekend and Beacon Harbor, Michigan, has a packed schedule of events, including the Pumpkin Pageant, featuring humans and their canine counterparts. For treats, there’s plenty of pumpkin goodness from bakery/café owner and local lighthouse resident Lindsey Bakewell. But someone wants to spoil the fun with a deadly trick . . .Lindsey prefers to keep her bakeshop’s Halloween decor light and autumnal, rather than gruesome and ghoulish. But everyone knows her lighthouse home is haunted. Some intrepid teens have even tried to break in to witness the resident ghost themselves. Dreading Halloween night, Lindsey reluctantly allows her influencer and podcaster best friend, Kennedy, to host a live ghost-hunting investigation in the lighthouse, conducted by a professional team. Protective of her ghost, Lyndsey is understandably nervous about what they might uncover . . .
The segment is uneventful—until things take a terrifying turn. The team freaks out. As Kennedy joins the mad dash outside, she bumps into what looks like the prankster teens’ creepy clown costume hanging from a tree. But when Lindsey’s dog, Wellington, begins to whine, they make a grim discovery: the clown is no dummy. It’s a corpse.
Now Lindsey and company will need to keep their cool if they want a ghost of a chance to solve the murder—and see another Halloween . . .
Darci Hannah is the bestselling author of the Beacon Bakeshop Mystery Series, the Food & Spirits Mystery Series (to be released in 2024), the Very Cherry Mystery Series, and two works of historical fiction, The Exile of Sara Stevenson, and The Angel of Blythe Hall. Darci grew up in the Midwest and currently lives in a small town in Michigan with her husband and two dogs. Darci is a lifelong lover of the Great Lakes, a natural wonder that inspires many of her stories. Passionate about family, dogs, food, baking, history, books, lighthouses, laughter, good conversations, coffee, and the paranormal, Darci feels especially blessed to have found a way to combine her interests in the stories she writes. It brings her great joy to be able to share them with you.
