Pumpkin Doughnut Muffins with a Cheerios Streusel for a Cheerios Breakfast Bash!

Remember the Cheerio Snickerdoodles I made a while back? Well, Cheerios caught wind and liked them so much that they asked me if I wanted to have my very own Cheerios breakfast bash, on them. That wasn’t very hard to answer… A week and 8 HUGE packages later, this was what my kitchen looked like (with lots of help from my dad and BYU buddies that came to visit me this past weekend):

Can you believe that the boys actually twirled the streamers?

Everyone that came got to keep a Honey Nut Cheerios bowl, kazoo, recipe flip deck, bee antennas, and a t-shirt!

As for me, I got a sweet robe!

Then, all the cuties came and fell in love with BuzzBee.

Did you know that it would take 3,168,000,000 Honey Nut Cheerios to wrap all the way around the earth? Me either.

And we ate our hearts away…

BuzzBee wasn’t the only charming fella…

It was so cute how into it my dad got. He really went all out and helped so much with the picture taking.

Also, special thanks to my DB for taking pictures as well!

Being a recent (errrrr maybe not so recent) college grad, I lived off this stuff. Cereal and milk.. perfect for any time of the day! I enjoy Honey Nut Cheerios so much because it’s the perfect amount of sweet. When I was little, I used to add sugar to all my cereals (go figure). This is the only one I didn’t touch!

Do like them on Facebook and check out their website… it has a lot of great ideas, including a recipe section which I recently just discovered. Did someone say more Cheerios desserts?

And of course, how can we have a Cheerios party without having a Cheerios baked good? I thought the Cheerios flavor would go well with pumpkin, so here’s what I came up with:

They were a hit with the little ones!

I even took them outside and gave them to all my little neighbor kids (along with some kazoos).

The doughnut muffin recipes comes slightly adapted from the Food Librarian, while the streusel recipe was mine. I didn’t completely crush the Cheerios in the topping, but I would recommend doing so next time. They became chewy if they weren’t crushed all the way. Makes 24 muffins.

Muffins

• 1 1/4 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice 
• 1/3 cup buttermilk (I used regular milk)
• splash of vanilla
• 1 1/4 cups pure pumpkin puree
• 3/4 cup light brown sugar
• 2 large eggs

Cheerio Streusel

• 1 cup crushed Honey Nut Cheerios cereal
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1/3 cup butter, softened

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Line a muffin pan.
3. In a bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices. Set aside.
4. Whisk together the buttermilk and pumpkin puree. Set aside.
5. Using your mixer, cream butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy. Slowly add in the eggs and vanilla until mixed.
6. Stir in the flour mixture to the butter mixture in three additions, alternating with the pumpkin puree mixture. Do not overmix.
7. Spoon the batter into the liners until they are about 3/4 full.
8. For the topping, mix all ingredients together in a bowl with a fork until it comes together. Evenly distribute the topping onto each individual muffin.
9. Bake for about 15 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.