Easy Pumpkin Cheesecake Muffin Recipe

You know how much love I love experimenting with baking ideas in the kitchen, right?

Well, my latest concoction was a spin on a Pillsbury Pumpkin quick bread box mix. On the side of the box, you can find a pumpkin cheesecake muffin recipe, so I got a little creative and made my own version of them.

My daughter had 5 girls sleeping over for her birthday party this weekend, so I had a great audience to test them out on!

The Pillsbury recipe calls for a sugary crumble on top of the muffin, but I didn't think it was necessary, considering that these were breakfast muffins and not cupcakes! So I prepared them a little differently than the recipe calls for, and I also omitted the freshly grated lemon zest, as I didn't have any lemons!

Pumpkin Cheesecake Muffin Recipe 

Filling 

• 1 (8 oz) package cream cheese, softened
• 1 large egg
• 2 tablespoons sugar (I changed this to 3 tablespoons because we like the filling a lot sweeter)

Muffins 

• (14 oz) package Pillsbury Pumpkin Quick Bread Mix
• ¾ cup milk
• 2 ½ tablespoons unsweetened apple sauce (or 2 tablespoons vegetable oil)
• 1 large egg

Directions

Heat oven to 350 F. Coat 12 muffin cups with no-stick cooking spray or use muffin liners.

Beat cream cheese in medium bowl with electric mixer until soft. Add egg and sugar and beat until smooth.

Place pumpkin bread mix into large bowl. Add milk, applesauce and egg and stir 50 strikes until well blended.

Fill each muffin cup with about ⅔ of the way full with your batter and then make indentation in batter with small measuring spoon with sprayed with no-stick cooking spray.

Put 1 heaping tablespoon cream cheese mixture in center of each muffin and then add about 1 teaspoon of batter on top of the cheesecake mixture, like so:

Bake 20 minutes and then cool before eating!

The kids really liked this pumpkin cheesecake muffin recipe - even though there was no additional sugar and I substituted applesauce for the oil! There were 6 kids in total and this recipe makes 12 muffins...and all of the muffins were gone when they were done with breakfast!

I know a lot of parents don't try to make things healthier because they don't think the children will eat them, but you would be surprised! Most things have so much sugar in them anyway that you don't need any additional!