October 12, 2010

An Autumn Treat!

So, I've admired the site Ming Makes Cupcakes for a while now.  For my fiance's birthday this past weekend, I decided to make him the cupcake of his choice.  He picked "Cupcake 15" - the pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.  A great choice, if I do say so myself...

Here's the recipe from Ming's site:

Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

CUPCAKES
1 cup flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
pinch of nutmeg
pinch of cloves
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
1 cup pumpkin

 Mix flour, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, and cloves. In a separate bowl, mix sugar and eggs. Add oil and mix at medium speed for three minutes. Add flour mixture, and then add pumpkin.  Mix at medium speed until well blended.  Bake at 350 for 30 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean.

FROSTING
4 oz. room temp. cream cheese
1/2 stick room temp. butter
1/2 lb confectioner’s sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla

crystallized ginger

Mix ingredients together by hand.  Once blended, whip with an electric mixer until fluffy.  Top cupcakes and add crystallized ginger if desired.
I'll walk you through how I made them, because I will admit they turned out puuuurty good.

Starting with the cupcakes.

First, I mixed all the dry ingredients together like so...


Then, whipped up the wet ingredients...


Next, I added the flour mixture and the pumpkin to the wet ingredients to create the cupcake batter.  When filling up the cupcake sleeves, note that this batter doesn't rise as much as fluffier batter tends to do. So, you can fill the cups up about halfway or a little more.  Although, I inadvertently liked the smaller cupcakes I made before I knew this.  So, just a heads up so you can choose your preference.   


On to everyone's favorite...the FROSTING!

In order to convert the half pound of powdered sugar that the recipe calls for, I added a little less than a cup.  This turned out really well!  I also ended up doubling the recipe, because you can never have too much frosting!  The recipe calls for you to mix by hand before using the electric mixer.  I'm guessing this is a really important step; otherwise, the powdered sugar would fly everywhere.  Cleaning. Nightmare.  Not that I know from experience or anything...


I piped the icing onto the cupcake, then sprinkled a little cinnamon on top (instead of the ginger ;) ). Voila!

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