Pumpkin Oat Muffins are as comforting as a warm hug on a cool, dreary morning. And they fill your home with the sweet and spicy scent of autumn baking. (And by the way, I wrote this post a few years ago when I lived on the 8th floor of a building. The geese do not fly past my current ground-floor kitchen window.)

It’s dull, cool and rainy outside. Geese fly by the balcony intermittently, their honking sounding forlorn, although for all I know they’re having a great a time. (Aside: will I ever get used to birds flying past at eye level? And will this ever happen when I’m out there with my camera?)

Inside, though, is another story. All is warm and cozy, the sweet and spice-perfumed scent of baking in the air. Halloween is tomorrow, so it only seemed fitting to bake with pumpkin this morning.

I made my first batch of these pumpkin muffins a few weeks ago, but still wanted to play with the recipe before presenting it to you. This kind of tinkering is one of my favourite ways to start a weekend morning. If I were making muffins on a weekday when work deadlines call me into the office, I’d use a tried and true recipe. But these no-particular-things-to-do days give me the latitude to putter and create. (I was going to call days like this “lazy,” but truth be told, there are very few lazy days for me. Yes, I’m one of those people, always doing something or other.)

The oats mentioned in the title of this recipe aren’t the large flake oats you were likely expecting. Instead, I tried a new ingredient today: oat flour. I would normally have used a cup of whole wheat flour in this recipe, but today I replaced half with oat flour, for flavour and nutrition. I also used oat bran, which I’ve been putting in my Oat Bran Banana Muffins for years. I found the muffins more crumbly in texture than usual, but they were still moist.

Another new muffin ingredient is the addition of molasses to add a different hit of sweetness. Although I used only one tablespoon, the molasses flavour still comes through. In the note-to-self department, I’ll use either fancy or cooking molasses instead of the more, ahem, powerful blackstrap that I added today, as either would be a better choice for baking (check out the difference here).

And one more thing before we get to that recipe…. In recent years I’ve been flirting with more la-di-da dried fruit, like cranberries and sour cherries, instead of the raisins that were in practically everything when I was a kid. Lately though, I’ve found myself revisiting the humble raisin. I’m finding they add not just sweet chewiness, but a nostalgic hug to my recipes.