Pumpkin Applesauce Muffins with Maple Cream Glaze

Halloween night. Camila in her baker costume, Sofia as a zombie (which she insists is "ironic"), Diego as a robot (naturally — a robot costume he made himself from cardboard boxes and aluminum foil and LED lights he wired to a battery pack, because Diego cannot simply be a robot, he must be a functioning robot), Isabella as Florence Nightingale, and Luis Jr. at the door with a bowl of candy he had already thinned by a third. We went trick-or-treating in the neighborhood — the Lower Valley, our neighborhood, where every other house has a skeleton on the porch and the air smells like grilled corn and tamales and someone, somewhere, is always playing music.

Camila collected candy with the ruthless efficiency of a small businesswoman. She said "trick or treat" at every house with the volume of a town crier, and when one house gave her a single piece she looked at the woman and said, "Only one?" and I apologized and pulled Camila away and Camila said, in the car, "That was a bad house, Mamá," and I could not argue because she was right — one piece is objectively insufficient and Camila knows her worth.

Diego's robot costume malfunctioned at the third house — the LED lights flickered and died, and Diego sat on the curb and troubleshot the wiring with a flashlight while his siblings continued without him, and I sat next to him on the curb and held the flashlight and watched him work and thought: this is what parenting is. It is not the big moments — the costumes and the candy and the photographs. It is the curb. It is the flashlight. It is sitting next to your child while they fix something broken and not trying to fix it for them.

We came home with a pillowcase full of candy and the children dumped it on the living room floor and sorted it into piles — chocolate, gummy, hard candy, the weird stuff no one wants — and they traded with the serious intensity of stock traders, and I watched from the couch with Luis and thought: this is the photograph too. Not just the Saturday at the park. This also. The Tuesday of candy sorting and broken LEDs and a four-year-old in a baker costume who told a grown woman her house was bad. All of it. All of it is the photograph.

I made caramel apples at the bakery this week — not a Rosa recipe, not a Mexican recipe, but an American one, because my children are American and Halloween is American and sometimes you make the food that belongs to the country you are in, not the country you came from, and both are valid and both are yours. I dipped the apples in caramel and rolled them in crushed pecans and put them in the pastry case, and they sold moderately well, and Doña Esperanza looked at them suspiciously and said, "What is this?" and I said, "American dessert," and she said, "I will stick with my conchas," and that is fine. Doña Esperanza does not need to like caramel apples. Doña Esperanza is eighty years old and she has earned the right to eat only conchas for the rest of her life.

After the kids were in bed, I sat at the kitchen table and opened the notebook. Recipe seventy-two: Rosa's hot chocolate. Not the packet kind. The real kind — with a tablet of Mexican chocolate (Abuelita brand, because Rosa was loyal and we are loyal to what Rosa was loyal to) dissolved in hot milk with a cinnamon stick, whisked with a molinillo until it froths. I wrote it down and then I made it and drank it standing in the kitchen at midnight, and it tasted like Rosa's kitchen in Anapra, like a cold night in the desert, like the space between two countries, like home.

I made the caramel apples for the pastry case, but these muffins — I made for us. After the candy was sorted into piles on the living room floor and the kids were finally in bed and Rosa’s hot chocolate was warming my hands at the kitchen table, I thought about what I wanted to bake in the morning: something that smelled like October, something with apple and pumpkin and sweetness, something the children could find on the counter before school and know that Halloween wasn’t entirely over. These muffins are exactly that — soft and spiced, with a maple glaze that reminds me, just a little, of the caramel I’d been working with all week, and they belong entirely to this season and this neighborhood and this family.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 20 minutes | Total Time: 35 minutes | Servings: 12 muffins

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
3/4 cup pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1/3 cup neutral oil (vegetable or canola)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Maple Cream Glaze:
1 cup powdered sugar, sifted
2 tablespoons pure maple syrup
1–2 tablespoons whole milk or cream, as needed
Pinch of cinnamon

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C). Line a standard 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners or grease with nonstick spray.
Mix dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves until evenly combined.
Mix wet ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the pumpkin puree, applesauce, brown sugar, granulated sugar, eggs, oil, and vanilla until smooth and well blended.
Combine. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and fold gently with a spatula until just combined — a few small streaks of flour are fine. Do not overmix or the muffins will be dense.
Fill and bake. Divide the batter evenly among the 12 muffin cups, filling each about 3/4 full. Bake for 18–21 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the tops spring back lightly when touched.
Cool. Let muffins cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before glazing.
Make the glaze. Whisk together the powdered sugar, maple syrup, and 1 tablespoon milk until smooth. Add additional milk one teaspoon at a time until the glaze is thick but pourable. Stir in the pinch of cinnamon.
Glaze and serve. Drizzle glaze generously over cooled muffins. Allow glaze to set for 10 minutes before serving. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.

Nutrition (per serving)

Pumpkin Applesauce Muffins with Maple Cream Glaze — The Sweetness We Carry Home