Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins
Fluffy pumpkin muffins stuffed with cheesecake filling baked inside of them, with cinnamon streusel topping.
Servings: 12 muffins
Ingredients
For the Cream Cheese Filling
- 8 oz Cream Cheese 225g
- ¼ cup White Sugar 50g
- ½ teaspoon Vanilla
For the Streusel Topping
- ½ cup All-purpose Flour 60g
- ⅓ cup White Sugar 66g
- ½ stick Butter 57g
- ½ teaspoon Ground Cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon Salt
For the Pumpkin Muffins
- 3 cups All-purpose Flour 360g
- 1 cup White Sugar 200g
- ¾ cup Light Brown Sugar 165g
- 3 teaspoon Ground Cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon Ground Ginger
- 3 teaspoon Baking Powder
- ½ teaspoon Baking Soda
- ½ teaspoon Salt
- 2 Eggs
- 1 stick Butter 113g
- ¼ cup Vegetable Oil 56g
- 1 can Pumpkin Puree 15oz / 425g
- ½ cup Milk 120g
- 1 teaspoon Vanilla
Instructions
Make the Cream Cheese Filling
- Put all the filling ingredients in a bowl and beat them together with a spoon until smooth and combined. It is important that the cream cheese is at room temperature or your filling may be lumpy.
- Put the bowl of filling in the freezer to chill while you prepare the streusel and muffin batter. *If you are making this ahead of time, just put it in the fridge, we don't want it to freeze, just to get cold and firm up a bit.
Make the Cinnamon Streusel Topping
- Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl and whisk together.
- Melt the butter in the microwave and pour ¾ of it into the dry ingredients. Mix with a fork until combined. Add a little more butter at a time, mixing in between until the mixture looks like chunky, wet sand. You may not need all of the butter. Set aside.
Make the Pumpkin Muffins
- Preheat the oven to 425°F / 220°C and line a muffin tray with muffin liners.
- Sift the flour, both sugars, spices, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into a large bowl and mix to combine.
- In a separate bowl, melt the butter in the microwave, then add to it all the other wet ingredients. Whisk together to combine.
- Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and whisk together until smooth and free from lumps.
- Scoop or spoon a small amount of muffin batter into the bottom of each muffin liner - about 1-2 tablespoons.
- Remove the cream cheese filling from the freezer, it should be cold and fairly firm (i.e. not runny).
- Use a teaspoon or a small melon baller to scoop dollops of cream cheese filling. Place them in the center of each muffin. Try not to keep the cream cheese in the middle of the muffin so it doesn't touch the sides.
- Once all the muffins are filled, put more muffin batter on top, filling them all the way to the top of the case.
- Sprinkle each muffin generously with streusel topping, and press down very gently to push the streusel into the batter.
- Place the muffins in the center rack of the oven and bake for 7 minutes. Then turn the temperature down to 350°F / 180°C and continue to bake for another 15 - 20 minutes. Once the muffins are ready they should be slightly springy to touch and a skewer inserted should come out clean (be careful to avoid the filling!).
Notes
Make sure you use pumpkin puree and not pumpkin pie filling.
To get bakery-style domes on your muffins, bake them at a high heat first, then turn the temperature down for the remainder of the bake time - see post above for more info.