Pumpkin Butt Muffins – A lesson in substitution

This past spring I learned a valuable lesson is substitution. Maybe I didn’t read the directions just right but man did our experiment go majorly wrong. My sister came to visit and we often cook together. As my son took his nap we went exploring in my pantry to see what we could whip up with the ingredients on hand. I had a can of pumpkin left over from the fall that I was dying to get rid of. It was real pumpkin not the pumpkin pie mix (which is something you don’t realize is different until you get the can home from the store.) We went online looking for a few recipes, but nothing was working out for real pumpkin with the ingredients I had. We finally found a recipe (on the can- Duh!) for a streusel pumpkin muffin that sounded yummy. The only problem was that is called for bisquick and the stuff I had in the back of my fridge could have been from God knows when. My sister had the brilliant idea to go online to see if we could find a substitute for bisquick. This is when things went horrible wrong. We found a posting for a mixture of shorting and flour. Sounded easy enough so we dove in, made our “bisquick” replacement and continued to make the muffins. They can out looking great....until we ate them. They tasted like butt (or what I image butt to taste like). Needless to say the muffins took a one way trip to garbage can land but all was not lost. The streusel topping was still edible so we managed to strip all the muffin tops of this. Just a lesson learned in the kitchen. When in doubt, make PB cookies (I always seem to have the ingredients for this on hand!)