Easy Pumpkin Waffles

**I'm interrupting my St. Lucia posts with a quick recipe post.  I just couldn't help myself from writing a food post after taking such a long break from the blog!**  

Happy first day of fall!  The morning air is starting to have a has a nice crisp to it, leaves are falling, and other Fall-y things are starting to happen.  Pumpkin spice and salted caramel mocha lattes at Starbucks and fall decorations sprouting up everywhere are enough to get me in the Fall spirit!  My friend Clare and I are absolutely in love with the salted caramel mocha.  If you haven't tried one yet...you need to...now.

If you didn't already know this about me, I absolutely love anything pumpkin flavored.  Last weekend, I woke up craving waffles.  But then I thought about how it was almost Fall so it would be completely appropriate to make pumpkin waffles!  I got so excited just at the thought of these that I dusted off my barely used Belgian waffle maker and got to work. 

I had a box of hungry jack buttermilk pancake mix, but you could also use Bisquick, or any other pancake mix.  I needed this to be quick and easy since I don’t like recipes with a lot of ingredients and I was hungry and ready to have me some waffles!  
 

I found this recipe online and it was perfect.  All you need is:

                

• 2 cups pancake mix
• 1 egg
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup canned pumpkin 
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix all the ingredients together until there are no lumps.  Turn on your waffle maker and spray generously with non-stick spray.

 

all the ingredients ready to mix

pumpkin waffle batter

I dropped about 1/3 cup of the mixture into my waffle iron, but the amounts may vary based on the size of the waffle maker you have.  The waffles took only 3 minutes or so to cook.  Once most of the steam was gone, I knew the waffles were pretty much done.  The end result are delicious waffles with a hint of pumpkin flavor.  They weren't overpowering at all.  I just had them with butter and syrup but I'm sure they would be great with pecans, cinnamon sugar, or brown sugar. 

breakfast is served

my waffle assembly line

pumpkin waffles

Enjoy!

Two Ingredient Pumpkin Muffins

Continuing on with my obsession with Pinterest recipes, I decided to try out this latest recipe.  If you know me, then you know I absolutely love anything pumpkin flavor.  It doesn't have to be Fall for me to enjoy a pumpkin treat.  Even if you aren't as into pumpkins as I am, I think you will still like this recipe.  Its fairly healthy too, with my rough calculations, they should be about 185 calories each if you make 12 muffins, which isn't bad if you're having it for breakfast. 

This recipe couldn't be any easier, just one box of yellow cake mix and one 15oz can of pumpkin.


I have made a similar recipe before, preparing the yellow cake mix as directed on the box and adding one up of the canned pumpkin.  It's one of my favorite cupcake recipes, so I was curious how this would turn out without using any of the oil, eggs, etc.

Cake mix and canned pumpkin

Mixing

All the pumpkin incorporated into the cake mix

The batter was thicker than your average cupcake, and didn't smell overwhelmingly of pumpkin.

I always like to use an ice cream scooper to divide the batter evenly into muffin sized cups.

I tried out different sized muffins

Bake at 350 for about 20-25 minutes and voila!

Baked and ready to eat

Of course I couldn't resist one

The end result is a dense, moist muffin with a hint of pumpkin flavor.  Not too sweet either, just perfect, and it took little to no effort to bake these up.  I will surely be making these again!