Last night was fun.  The kids were in bed asleep, Drew had gone out to a Bible study where he was giving his testimony (all in French) and I was surrounded by peace and quiet and the mumur of the over pre-heating.

My recipe (I found it on allrecipes.com) was as follows:

• 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 cups white sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1 cup canola oil
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 2 cups solid pack pumpkin puree
• 2/3 cup water

It’s a very basic and simple recipe which is what this novice baker was looking for 😉  But we didn’t have allspice or cloves so I had to leave those out.  However, we did have some left over brown sugar so I put what I had of that in and made up the rest in white sugar.  I also substituted applesauce for the canola oil, which I had read about from the reviews.  I wanted to use wheat flour but we only had white so I’ll save that alteration for next time.  And obviously the solid pack pumpkin puree was the butternut squash.

So it turned out that roughly half a butternut squash made all this!  And then some, because by the time I took this photo we had already eaten 6 of the muffins!

So I froze the other half of the BS puree and plan to get that out and bake a pumpkin pie sometime closer to Thanksgiving.

Well how did they turn out!?!?!

PERFECTLY.  You wouldn’t even know it was butternut squash instead of pumpkin.  The muffins at least, taste so spicey and fallish and pumpkiny.  They came out nice and moist and springy, even Drew did the spring test and said they were perfect 😀  You have no idea what that means to me 😀

My little piece of American fall has arrived and I am content.  We have decided to give the loaf to our neighbors who we are good friends with, and we shall devour the rest 🙂  It’s a nice cold autumnal day today, so after I finish writing this I shall stick the kettle on and enjoy a cuppa with my alternative muffins 😉

Happy Fall to you all.  Enjoy the changing of leaves and the crisp air that reminds us Christmas is on it’s way!!!  Ahhh I said the word Christmas.