Chocolate Pumpkin Coffee Cake Recipe

So I’ve got pumpkin.
I’m making pumpkin butter, but I wanted to make some use-it-now goodies as well, so I decided to make a coffee-cake type dessert. I had a look a three different recipes, and then made one up based on the general idea of what I’d seen.
 

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Chocolate Pumpkin Coffee Cake
 
INGREDIENTS
 
1½ C flour
¼ C cocoa
2 tbsp granulated sugar
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp each: salt, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger
 
½ C mashed pumpkin
2 tbsp maple syrup
1 egg
¼ C butter
½ C sour milk
 
¼ C chocolate chips
¼ C walnut crumbles (alternative: pecan crumbles OR hulled pumpkin seeds)
 
 
DIRECTIONS
 
Combine pumpkin, syrup, egg, butter, and sour milk in a large bowl and blend until reasonably smooth
 
Add the cocoa, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, flour, salt, and spices, and blend until smooth (I used a fork)
 
Add the crumbled walnuts and chocolate chips[1], and mix until well-integrated
 
Scrape batter into a greased 9×9 square pan (could also work in a loaf pan, I suspect) and bake at 350F for 45-60 minutes, or until it passes the fork test.
 
Allow to cool in the pan for about 15 minutes
 
Serve with cinnamon-vanilla whipped cream, ginger icecream, or some other luscious topping of your choosing. 🙂
 
 
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Okay.
So here’s the trick. Originally, I was going to have, like, three quarters of a cup of sugar in this. But I forgot to add it, so the recipe you see is the recipe I actually made (except that, in my case, I added the sugar shortly after I’d thrown everything in the oven, so I’m not sure how it’s going to turn out).
 
I’m guessing this will still be good, partly because bitter-sweet desserts are still tasty, and also because – between the maple syrup and the sweetness in the chocolate chips – there’s still sugar already in here. But I’ll be making the whipped cream extra sweet just in case. 😉
 
Here goes nothing. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] Most of the sweetness for this recipe comes from the chocolate chips, so we’ll see how this turns out.