Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

Fall means pumpkins!  Well, and a bunch of other stuff.  But one of my favorite things about fall is baking pumpkin goodies.  I decided to make some pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting to add a little twang to the sweetness instead of the usual buttercream frosting.  They were oh so delightful, it was hard not to eat them all in one sitting!


Pumpkin Cupcakes

2 cups white sugar
3/4 cup oil
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups canned or pureed pumpkin
4 eggs
2 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice (or whatever proportional combo you like best of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and maybe some ginger)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine the sugar, oil and apple sauce.  Add the pumpkin and vanilla and then beat in the eggs one at a time.  Mix all of the dry ingredients in another bowl, then slowly add the dry mixture to the wet ingredients.

Grease a mini muffin tin or use baking cups (I found some really cute ones at Michael's for about the same price as the plain white ones).  Fill about two thirds of the way.

Bake for 15 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean and then flip the cupcakes out onto a cooling rack.

While the cupcakes are cooling make the frosting.


Cream Cheese Frosting

16 oz cream cheese
1/2 cup butter
5-6 cups powdered sugar (can add more for thicker frosting)
2 tsp vanilla


Beat the butter and cream cheese together, then gradually add the powdered sugar and finally the vanilla (and any food coloring you may want to use).

Frost the cupcakes and enjoy!

You'll end up with a lot of frosting, so unless you like gobs of frosting on your cupcakes, I recommend halving the recipe (I ended up with a bunch leftover; not that having some extra frosting in the house is a terrible thing!).  This frosting is fairly soft, but if you want to firm it up a bit just add more powdered sugar until you reach your desired consistency.  The frosted cupcakes should be refrigerated.

Inspiration for cupcake recipe found here.

Stove Top Pumpkin Seeds

Last weekend we had several friends over for a Pumpkin Carving Party.  So with at least 15 large pumpkins being carved, you can imagine we had a lot of seeds!  Luckily our friend Mary prefers sorting out the seeds from the guts to the actual carving so we ended up with a large bowl full of seeds.

I mean really large.  Here's the bowl with a can of pop for size reference.  It was over 5 pounds of pumpkin seeds!

With so many seeds to toast the idea of laying them all out on a cookie sheet to bake them seemed arduous.  So while I decided what to do I soaked the seeds in heavily salted water for a day in the fridge and then drained them and popped them back in the fridge for most of another day.

Instead of baking them I used a large pan on the stove.  I used just a tiny bit of olive oil, just enough for a super thin layer to coat the pan, maybe 1 tablespoon.  I put it over medium heat and once the oil was hot tossed in enough seeds to cover the bottom of the pan.

Every few minutes stir around the seeds to make sure they're getting cooked on both sides.  Cook for a total 8-12 minutes, depending on how much moisture your seeds retained.  Once cooked dump the seeds onto a plate with a paper towel to absorb excess oil and salt to taste.

They turned out really good; I don't normally like pumpkin seeds much but these were delicious and made the whole house smell nicely of pumpkin seeds.

Obviously we weren't going to eat 5 pounds of pumpkin seeds on our own, so I put them in cute bags to give our to our friends.