These healthy pumpkin pie muffins are so fluffy and delicious that you won’t even know they’re whole wheat and and packed with almost 1/4 cup of pumpkin per muffin! Each muffin has only 176 calories!

I have a quick apology and explanation as to why I was missing for a solid two months. (Then we will get into talking about these amazing muffins.)

I am addicted to sugar. Whenever I bake, I eat way too many of the baked goods. This is actually a serious problem. I get terrible stomach aches and other side effects of overeating baked goods. I kept getting sick, my skin wasn’t great and I had terrible energy levels.

So I took a break. I didn’t bake as much in the fall, and for two months I barely baked at all. The only time I baked was with my friends and thus my baking lost its agenda. In other words, I could bake for fun and not worry about saving the prettiest cookies/cake/whatever for picture taking the next day at exactly 2:30 p.m. in the afternoon when the sun was at its prime. That was liberating and fun.

I missed my blog, though. I missed it a lot. I did some thinking and I realized, I love baking healthy things that you can’t even tell are healthy. So that’s what I’ll be doing more. You’re going to see less butter, more peanut butter! Less refined sugar, more honey and maple syrup! Hurray!

So these muffins. These muffins. I love breakfast muffins, but I usually avoid them because a single muffin can have up to 700 calories. (Yikes.)

These muffins are special because they have no oil or butter. Peanut butter takes the place of the butter/oil, which is a super nice little trick to have up your sleeve. In any recipe, you can substitute peanut butter for the butter. I mean, you don’t want peanut butter flavored sugar cookies, but it sure is handy if you want healthier muffins or breakfast cookies.

They’re also made completely with whole wheat flour! No white flours here. Honestly, I was very surprised how soft and fluffy these were with whole wheat flour. Sometimes whole wheat flour can make things heavy and grainy, but these were some of the softest, fluffiest muffins I’ve ever had.

These muffins are low sugar! I ran out of maple syrup after one Tablespoon (oops) so I used brown sugar instead. That’s fine though, even it’s refined, because there such a little amount of sugar.

You get a sneaky serving of fiber-dense veggies. Yes, pumpkin is a veggie, and in this case, they’re not that bad baked into it! You get two full Tablespoons of pumpkin per muffin, but if you’re me and you eat two muffins for breakfast, you’re getting a quarter cup of pumpkin. Not bad!

A few things for you:

• You’re welcome to make them with any kind of nut butter. I used peanut butter, but any other would work!
• I used 1/4 cup of brown sugar. You’re welcome to use any combination of refined or unrefined sugar. Just use a 1/4 cup total!
• I used a mixture of semi-sweet chocolate chips and butterscotch chips, but you’re welcome to use any combination of chips you’d like. Try peanut butter chips or white chocolate chips!
• I used whole wheat flour and they tasted amazing; however, you’re welcome use white whole wheat flour or even all-purpose flour.
• Don’t overmix or you’ll get non-soft muffins.

So enjoy these, okay? They’re really really yummy.