I’m not on social media. The idea of mindlessly scrolling my days away is a bleak one indeed. Do these people not have anything better to do with their time? I do, however, have a Pinterest account, which occasionally shows me TikTok videos, and that’s how I came to learn about, and I quote, “Tiny Tuna Muffins for Cats”. How could I not try making them?
First, I beat one egg:
Then, I drained a can of flaked tuna in water and added it to the egg.
“Mix well”, the video says. No kidding.
To this, I added 1/4 cup each all-purpose flour and shredded cheese.
And then…I mixed well again.
Next, I was instructed to grease a mini muffin tin…
…and add the mixture to the tin. Unlike actual mini muffins or cupcakes, there’s no fear of rising and overflowing, so I filled these pretty much to the top.
Bake at 350°F for 15-20 minutes.
Let cool and serve.
I have thoughts about these. First, use chunk tuna and not flaked; when I drained the tuna I also drained a lot of flakes out because they’re so darned small. My sink smelled like fish, my hands smelled like fish…ugh. Second, consider whether you want this fish goo touching your baking equipment. I bought a small mini muffin tin from the dollar store specifically for this so that I wasn’t at risk of permanently baking a fish smell into my good tins. Third, know your cats and what they like, and be prepared for any reaction anyway. Mine is a cheese fiend, but after taking a couple of nibbles and licking the fishy/cheesy essence from her muffin, completely ignored it.
Was it a cute idea? Sure. Will I be trying them again? Probably not. Maybe staying off social media isn’t so bad after all.
Maybe it’s a side effect of the pandemic, but I don’t bake as much as I used to. Sure, I’ll bake a batch of cupcakes or muffins sometimes, or my grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies, or mini cheesecakes if I’m feeling really ambitious, but…that’s the exception rather than the rule. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a huge sweet tooth, but these days I’d rather pick up a package of cookies from the grocery store if I’m craving something than be on my feet in the kitchen for ages.
But for one brief, shining moment I felt a flicker of my old self when I made the Triple Chocolate Hazelnut Brownie Pie from the Kitchen Magpie‘s book Flapper Pie and a Blue Prairie Sky for Mother’s Day.
What can I say? My mom likes chocolate – and has a way bigger sweet tooth than I do.
There are a lot of steps, but they aren’t difficult, and the end product looks way more impressive than the effort it actually took.
First, a chocolate crumb crust:
I know from this picture it looks level to the top of the pan, but I promise there’s a recess for filling. This pie pan has the weirdest-angled sides.
Next, a layer of brownie:
And then, while the brownie is still hot, some Nutella spread over the whole thing (or Kraft chocolate hazelnut spread, if that’s what’s available at your local grocery store).
See? I told you there was space in the middle.
One thing that really made this feel next-level for me? Toasting my own hazelnuts for the garnish. I’ve toasted coconut and sesame seeds (not at the same time), but this was a first for me.
Who would have thought that something as simple as chucking them in the oven for 10 minutes – when it had already been turned on to bake the brownie – would transform them like this? The flavour was so different before and after.
Once the brownie layer cooled completely, I made a chocolate hazelnut mousse to spread on top, and garnished with pieces of toasted hazelnut and chocolate curls. The curls weren’t called for in the original recipe, but while searching the bulk store for nuts I found a bin of curls and thought they’d make a nice addition.
The true test was going to come when we cut into the pie. Did it work?
It did! (Also, look at the angle of the pan’s sides. Crazy, man!)
I would like to go on record as stating that I cut that first piece entirely too large. This dessert is rich, and a small slice is more than enough to savour the magic of chocolate and hazelnuts.
Rich or not, my mom absolutely loved it, so mission accomplished.
I’ll spare you all the long and fabled history of the French-Canadian fur traders, because it’s widely available elsewhere. I had to learn about it in school, and even then, my strong pull toward an indoorsy life prevented me from fully embracing the spirit of the voyageur.
Recently, the newspaper published a recipe for tarte au sucre, a.k.a sugar pie. I hadn’t thought about it since I made one back in Grade 5 as part of the aforementioned school experience, but thought it sounded simple enough to try again. My baking buddy was enthusiastic when I showed him the recipe, and was even kind enough to pick up any missing ingredients from the store.
What you’ll need:
one (1) unbaked pie shell, deep-dish preferred (we used a frozen one)
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream (35%)
The recipe doesn’t call for it, but we added a generous splash of vanilla.
Turn the oven to 350°F, and while it comes to temperature, mix the brown sugar and flour together until well-combined. If your sugar is lumpy, break those puppies down. We used a fork to crumble them and incorporate them.
Next, add your whipping cream and mix well.
Pour the whole shebang into your pie shell, and bake for an hour.
The recipe warned about the potential for bubbling over, so we set our pie tin on a parchment-lined cookie sheet. It only cooked over a tiny bit, but it was nice not to have to scrape that off the bottom of the oven.
Cool completely before cutting.
I think ours might have been not-quite-100% cooled when we cut a trial piece, and our first reaction was: “Holy cow, is this sweet!” My ten-year old self hadn’t had a problem with it, but that was a lot of years ago.
For the next slice, it was definitely, positively cooled, and when it was topped with a bit of whipped cream, it wasn’t half-bad. With my 21st century, indoorsy ways, I wouldn’t want much more than a small piece in a single sitting – but I can appreciate why this would be a treat if one didn’t normally eat ultra-processed foods already crammed with hidden sugar.
And because there’s always pop-culture inspiration behind my makes, here’s what was going through my head as we baked:
A little while back, I had wanted to make a dozen vanilla cupcakes. If you’ve been with me for any length of time, you’ll probably know that I have yet to find a really lovely, moist, not-too-dense vanilla cupcake recipe. So it was with only a minimum of guilt that I reached for a cake mix – and because one mix makes 24 cupcakes (or 22, according to the box), I carefully divided the dry mix in two and saved half for another time. Fast-forward to me being sick of making sure I don’t stash my baggie of cake mix too far into the recesses of the pantry, and also don’t lose the instructions I cut off the box to save. It was time to do something with this.
When my baking buddy and I used to work together, we had a birthday club at work. The one year I was in it, I asked him what kind of birthday cake he wanted, and he replied, “Boston cream pie.” I think that was the first time I had ever baked something just for him…who knew it was just the start? I also hadn’t made Boston cream pie cupcakes since then, so it was time for a hit of nostalgia.
I started by baking my cupcakes more or less according to package directions. A full mix calls for three eggs, and I was fresh out of half-eggs so I used two. (Gasp!) There might be something to that promised yield of 22 cupcakes instead of 24, because as I was filling up my last few liners I was really scraping the bottom of the bowl.
Once they had cooled, I grabbed my trusty cupcake corer and put it to good use. The best part about this is that I got to set the cores aside in a little bowl, to be topped with the leftover filling and topping and consumed as a guilt-free snack later because calories don’t count when they’re bite-sized. (Right?)
It was time for the filling. The first time I made these way back when, I had tried making a pastry crème from one of my vegan cookbooks, and it was an abysmal failure. Maybe trying it again until I got it right would have helped, but I didn’t have time for that, and found a shortcut on that wonderful trove that is the internet. It seems that… [looks around for eavesdroppers and whispers hastily] vanilla instant pudding, made with half the milk called for on the box, sets up with just the right consistency to fill cakes and/or cupcakes. And a four serving-size box prepared thusly will provide enough pudding for a dozen cupcakes, plus a bit extra for all those cores I saved.
The final step was adding ganache to the top. I’ve seen recipes for Boston cream pie cupcakes that use a chocolate buttercream and I admit those fluffy swirls are pretty, but the classic simplicity of the ganache is all these treats really need.
(Bonus: this was a great way to use up some snowflake cupcake liners left over from Christmas.)
A brief chill-out in the fridge helped the chocolate set admirably. When I unveiled these with a flourish to my baking buddy, the first thing he said was, “Hey, remember when you made these for me at work?” Nostalgia is a powerful force!
Around Valentine’s Day, my Baking Buddy and I decided to re-watch the To All the Boys trilogy on Netflix. (Was this my idea? Yes. But was he into it? Also yes.) We were partway through the first one when I realized, with a funny pang, that no matter how cute the two leads might be, the book was so much better. The book is always better than its filmic adaptation. And naturally, that (re)discovery meant that I needed to (re)read the books, stat.
One thing they do show in the movies in a mostly faithful adaptation of the novels is Lara Jean’s baking. There’s something so relaxing about watching her very neatly go through the process of making, say, cherry turnovers or frosting a batch of cupcakes perfectly. In the third book, Always and Forever, Lara Jean, she’s on a quest to bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie.
(Can I just say here that that book stresses me the heck out? First of all, it’s the final book in the series, so there’s the anticipation of “goodbye” which is inherently a little stressful in itself. Then, there’s the agony of waiting for university acceptances to be announced, and I am so glad that social media wasn’t a thing when I was waiting. There’s the fact that she doesn’t get in to her first choice school and the idea that her happily-ever-after might be derailed because of it. Her friends ambush her with a surprise birthday party, and her dad ambushes her with a trip to Korea without even asking if she wanted to go or had other plans for the summer. Oh, yeah, and her boyfriend’s mother is a manipulative cow. Ugh.)
When she’s not being pressured five ways from Sunday, she’s baking batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies, and encounters Jacques Torres’ take on it during a trip to New York. I was pleasantly surprised to see that his recipe is readily available online, and decided I had to try it. These are supposedly the ne plus ultra of cookies, and perhaps that’s why the recipe thinks it can get away with its extreme fussiness. In no particular order:
It uses two kinds of flour: cake flour and bread flour. For some of us, this means a trip to the grocery store for five-pound bags only to use ~2 cups of each. What happened to all-purpose flour?
The dough must be made 24 – 72 hours in advance, and allowed to rest in the fridge before baking. While I have made dough the night before in the past just to expedite the baking process the next day, there’s a big difference between deciding to do it as a gift to your future self and being told you have to do it, thereby necessitating even more planning. (Hope you’ve got the flours!)
It calls for chocolate discs instead of chocolate chips, and then (annoyingly) provides a weight rather than a volume measurement. Luckily I found some lovely dark chocolate discs at Bulk Barn; less luckily, a modestly sized bag of them cost $15. I will admit that they were good, though – I don’t even like dark chocolate, but couldn’t tell that’s what these were.
A petty complaint, but, per the last step in the recipe: “Best eaten warm.” Do they think I’m baking for a party, here?
Step 3 of the recipe urges us not to overmix, but to mix only until the dry ingredients are incorporated, 5 to 10 seconds. My guess is that they don’t want to overdevelop the gluten (then why use bread flour, seriously?), but that is not enough time to work four cups of flour in.
Despite the misgivings brought on by the above, I gamely bought my ingredients and planned ahead so it had about 40 hours of resting time before baking, which is pretty good, I thought.
We tried to use a cookie scoop for maximum uniformity but the dough was so stiff from its time in the fridge that we quickly dispensed with that and grabbed two spoons instead.
They still wound up uniform-ish.
The recipe advises pushing in any discs that stick out of the dough for a better aesthetic once baked. Does it sound silly? Yes, but we dutifully did it anyway.
I was surprised by how much these spread, considering how long the dough had been chilled and that it didn’t really get a chance to warm up that much – I guess that’s what using butter will do for you.
We didn’t use flaked salt as recommended, but sprinkled a few grains of kosher salt on top to contrast against the sweetness of the cookie.
Overall? These weren’t bad, but I don’t know that they were worth the hassle, either. They were a perfectly OK cookie, but the flours, chilling, and pricey chocolate didn’t necessarily elevate them to superstar status. One interesting thing the discs did is melt and streak throughout the cookie, giving the inside a really neat appearance. And just like the recipe says, they truly do taste better warm. My test audience liked these well enough, so these may be a “sometimes” bake. (Or perhaps a more frequent bake until I use up the rest of the special flours I bought.)
Have you ever had one of those days when you wanted to bake something for the special people in your life, but also didn’t want to spend all day messing around with rolling and cutting dough, decorating to the nines, and all that other stuff?
Relax, because I’ve got you.
In the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, I saw (and Pinned!) all manner of cutesy cookies and other sweet treats, a fair number of which were heart-shaped and bedecked with red and pink sprinkles and/or frosting. They were cute, but the prospect of having to actually find the time to make them was a daunting one. Eventually, it hit me: why not make something I already know is quick and tasty, but dress it up? A few weeks back, the newspaper had run an article in its Arts & Life section about how to add a swirl to brownies, and that sounded like a darned good idea.
I started with Quick and Easy Brownies (because they are quick and easy!), but you could use your favourite recipe.
They’re not naturally lumpy; I stirred in half a bag of semi-sweet chips and chunks (about 1 cup, give or take) for a little extra chocolatey goodness.
If the title of this post hasn’t completely given it away, I decided to try a peanut butter swirl. I spooned about half a cup of peanut butter – this is a visual estimate only – into a standard zip-top bag, snipped one corner, and went to town.
A quick word on this: I found it really hard to squeeze the peanut butter out! I have no idea if melting the peanut butter first or even just having held the filled bag in my hot little hands for a minute or two would have helped. Because of this, the peanut butter was a bit hard to control and didn’t always pipe on where I wanted it to. Notice the nearly-naked perimeter that goes 3/4 of the way around.
Next, the fun part! Take a butter knife or other implement of mass swirling, and start dragging it through the peanut butter.
Every single tip I read about this cautions against over-swirling. You still want some contrast between the base and the swirl, and don’t want it to all homogenize into one chocolateandpeanutbutter layer on top. I might have swirled more than necessary, but I was also trying to work my peanut butter into all those missed edges and corners. Overall, I think I managed it. Once I was satisfied, I baked as usual.
Apparently I gave the pan a quarter-turn clockwise when I took it out of the oven! But look at how nicely that swirl stayed in place. I half-expected it to sink to the bottom during baking, and the fact that it stayed on top gives me an inflated sense of my own culinary genius.
The only thing I would have done differently is to have cut the pieces larger. No pictures, but I did a 4 x 6 cut to get 24 pieces out of an 8″ square pan. They were the perfect size for popping into your mouth, but really didn’t show off the swirl to its best advantage. (They still tasted great, though!)
I’ve written in the past about trying to find a red velvet cupcake recipe that’s both tasty and fire-engine red (oh, and moist! But that’s a cousin of “tasty”). Since the last time I wrote about it, my red velvet escapades have primarily consisted of hitting up a local restaurant famous for its version and/or trying my recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World with the addition of red velvet baking emulsion and red velvet cocoa from Bulk Barn. Somehow, the inclusion of these ingredients seemed to only make the finished product dryer than usual, so I quickly abandoned that. But hey, that’s OK – there’s always the restaurant cake.
And then, a special request for mini Baileys cheesecakes came my way. Cheesecakes, I can handle. When I nonchalantly found my way over to Life, Love, and Sugar to double-check the ingredients, whammo! There was a recipe for red velvet cupcakes staring me in the face. ”No harm in at least reading it through,” I thought, followed by, “Hey, this looks pretty straightforward.” At the very least, I had all of the ingredients in the house, and – bonus! – this would be a great way to use up the little bit of buttermilk left in the carton from a different recipe. I tried to temper my expectations, and got my supplies together.
There are only two teaspoons of cocoa in the whole recipe, and yet – and yet! – they still managed to have little cocoa-y clumps that I tried my darnedest to break down with my mixing spoon.
It got interesting in the wet ingredients. The recipe calls for two teaspoons of red food colouring. I found a powdered colour by LorAnn and tried it on a whim, thinking it might be more concentrated than a liquid colour. Dang, did it ever make my wet ingredients red!
The colour was muted only a hair when I added my wet ingredients into my dry. The method surprised me: normally, I’d add dry to wet, but I dutifully followed the instructions. The oddest part was after the two sets of ingredients are mixed, a half-cup of hot water gets slowly incorporated. It makes the batter incredibly thin, and I admit I was a bit skeptical at first.
The thin, thin batter made filling my cups a bit of a messy prospect, but they baked up like a charm and (bonus!) retained that nice red colour.
I cheated a bit and used a can of store-bought frosting, for a couple of reasons: 1) There had been a can kicking around the pantry from a bake a while ago that didn’t happen and I wanted to use it up instead of tossing it, and 2) I don’t have the clairvoyance required to have taken out cream cheese to start softening before I even realized I was going to bake, so a homemade cream cheese frosting was out. For the record, it wasn’t awful. It definitely tasted less sweet on the cupcakes than it did off the knife, and it served that all-important purpose of keeping the tops moist.
Look how red they stayed! That was one point for them, but how did they taste?
Like red velvet should, that’s how. These are moist (there’s that word again…) with a tender crumb and just the slightest hint of cocoa to compliment the notes of vanilla from the extract. The next time I make these, I’m pulling out all the stops and making a homemade frosting for them. A cream cheese frosting would really pop on these, although I’m also having thoughts of the cream cheese whipped cream topping I use for almost everything.
Today’s musical inspiration is courtesy of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs:
Years ago, I found a recipe for the charmingly-named Man Catcher Brownies in a magazine. Brownies are good, but brownies with a layer of caramel in the centre? Yes, please. I’ve made them several times and even shared them with coworkers, and somehow don’t have a harem of husbands, so perhaps the name is a bit of an exaggeration. Ahem.
Recently, I was leafing through one of my mom’s cookbooks. When I hit a recipe for saucily-named brownies, I glanced at it briefly before realizing that this was exactly the same recipe. There were a couple of minor tweaks; for example, how the second brownie layer was added, and a heck of a lot more caramel, but otherwise this was it. And despite having had the recipe in my collection for ages, I was suddenly craving them again. Luckily for me, my Baking Buddy was all in.
(You can find the recipe for Man Catcher Brownies here. The recipe comments include a step-by-step video from the girl who originally submitted the recipe to the magazine, so these are the originals, folks!)
First, we gathered our ingredients:
I have a question for my American friends, if anyone wants to chime in down below in the comments. Are you guys experiencing an ever-shrinking selection at the grocery store, too, or is that just happening here? Every single version of the recipe I’ve seen calls for a German chocolate cake mix, and if I had to wait to find one, these babies would never get made. It feels like over the last…ooh, decade or more, for sure, and probably much longer, all the grocery chains have been supplanting their previously wide array of certain products with their own store brand, leaving us with only a few token flavours/varieties. There is no orange cake mix, or German chocolate cake mix, or strawberry cake mix. We’re lucky to have a choice between devil’s food and regular chocolate. Meanwhile, President’s Choice, Compliments, and Co-op Gold all pop up like so many weeds. I’m pretty sure the same thing is happening with Jello flavours too (remember Berry Black?), and possibly canned soup. And yes, we bought a store brand mix for this because it’s not being used for an actual cake, but I’m sure the holy spirit of Huncan Dines (apologies to V.N.) is furious.
The most tedious part of this is unwrapping all the caramels…
I promise it’s worth it, though! With a little evaporated milk, these form a beautiful soft centre for our brownies.
Meanwhile, the cake mix, melted butter, and more evaporated milk get mixed together. The dough turns out really stiff, which makes this parting-of-the-Red-Sea trick really easy.
I did what felt like the logical thing, and divided it in half – half for the bottom and half for the top, right? Makes sense. The only problem is that half of this will not quite cover the bottom of a 9″ x 13″ pan, and you’ll need to borrow some from the top’s share. I had forgotten this from the last time I made them, and suddenly the fact that the version of the recipe in my mom’s book uses a 9″ square pan makes a lot more sense. After some mild cussing on my part, my Baking Buddy took over to get the dough pressed into the corners of the pan, and then we threw the whole mess in the oven for 7 minutes. The process of baking and puffing-up hides a multitude of sins, and I was already feeling better.
Now it’s time to top it! First, the caramel sauce gets spread over everything:
The partially-cooked bottom layer is quite delicate at this point, and spreading the caramel too vigorously will tear it. Once we were happy with our caramel coverage, we sprinkled some pecan pieces and semi-sweet chocolate chips over it, and then topped with the remaining dough. The problem with using more than half the dough for the bottom is that there won’t be enough to completely cover the top.
By this point, I was ready to pitch the whole thing, because really! But much like the bottom puffed up after baking, so too did the top after we stuck it back in the oven.
I don’t think anybody is going to be fooled into thinking that the top is completely covered (it’s not), but it was an improvement for sure. A little peekaboo caramel never hurt anyone, right?
The recipe is pretty adamant that they cool completely before slicing, so we waited patiently.
They sliced like a dream! And once they were cut into itty-bitty pieces (we got 32 from our pan), the exposed caramel wasn’t nearly as noticeable – it became more of a hint of what was to come than a huge breach in the middle of the pan.
Look at that lovely gooey caramel!
We layered ours between parchment in an airtight container, but these would make a perfect homemade gift for someone presented in a cute little treat box.
I can’t remember when I first encountered them, but every Easter the German bakery near me makes these…well, I’m not quite sure how to classify them. (Oh, this post is off to a great start!) They look like they could be cookies – they’re sized to be held in one’s hand and not so complicated that a fork is required – but they’re thick and puffy and in cross-section almost look like a small, not-very-moist, sturdy cake. And one of the staff members once commented on them using a yeasted dough…does that make these bread? The bakery itself coyly calls them “Bunny Faces”, and they usually get consumed so quickly that no one’s taking the time to reverse-engineer them to put a label on them.
Some careful googling took me down a rabbit hole (ha!) to this recipe. Sure, the ones in the picture had clearly used a different bunny-shaped cookie cutter, but these were them! Finally, I could make these, and…uh, what’s quark? I had never heard of it (much less seen it in a grocery store), but every person I spoke to who was of German or quasi-German descent knew immediately what I was talking about and pronounced it differently than I had been. (Because I know you’re curious: I had been saying the last part of the word like “orc”, but it’s really like “arc”, or “ark”, depending on whether you’re doing geometry or building a boat of epic proportions.)
That all changed this year, when a chance detour down the dairy aisle yielded this:
“Quark makes you strong!”
I twisted my Baking Buddy’s rubber arm to help me with these. We took our task very seriously and even broke out his kitchen scale to follow the recipe as accurately as possible. Yes, you can search online to discover that 150 g of sugar is approximately 3/4 of a cup, but that’s not a very precise approach.
Even after mixing the wet ingredients together, the batter looked like no other cookie dough I’ve seen.
Once the flour and baking powder have been added, it needs to rest for half an hour or so before kneading it briefly and rolling it out. It might not be a yeasted dough, but it sure behaves like one.
It’s already puffy before being baked! I didn’t have a bunny cutter, so we started out making little cats before deciding circles were easier.
I was a little skeptical about brushing them with melted butter before baking, but they didn’t appear greasy in the slightest after coming out of the oven.
The bottoms got a beautiful golden colour, though!
We opted to skip the step of brushing them with more melted butter before turning them into the sugar, but still got plenty to stick because they were still hot when we did this.
Look at that inside! Is it a cake? Is it a cookie? Who cares – it’s tasty as all get-out!
They don’t have as much colour on the tops as the bakery version does, and we think if we make them again we might try an egg wash to combat that. The prepackaged vanilla sugar we used didn’t seem to have a lot of kick, either, so this may require homemade vanilla sugar.
All in all, though, I’m pretty happy with how they came out for a first attempt. It’s nice to have an at-home version for when they’re out of season at the bakery.
I had to go at least a little pumpkin-y while the season still permits, didn’t I? Don’t get me wrong, the apple bread is still firmly in my repertoire, but it’s nestled in there right beside pumpkin as an autumn-y bake.
I’ll keep it short and sweet, because Christmas crafting time is ticking away, and you’ve got better things to do than listen to me wax poetic about pumpkin, don’t you? Besides, this baking adventure wasn’t born out of sentimentality, but of pragmatism: I had a container of pumpkin in the fridge as well as half a brick of cream cheese, and I wanted to use them both up.
Over the years, I’ve mish-mashed a few pumpkin cupcake recipes together and honed the finished result until it was perfect. So without further ado, I present…pumpkin spice cupcakes with cinnamon-cream cheese frosting.
For the cupcakes:
1 cup canned pumpkin
1/3 cup canola oil
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup milk* (see note)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon (or more, if you’re a fan – I used a heaping teaspoon)
1/4 tsp. salt
a pinch of ground nutmeg
a pinch of ground cloves
*NOTE: if you want these to be pumpkin spice latte cupcakes, you can dissolve 4 1/2 tsp. instant coffee in your milk. And if you want these extra-coffee flavoured, keep about 1/4 cup from your morning pot of joe set aside to brush on the tops of the cupcakes before frosting them.
Preheat oven to 350°F, and line a 12-cavity cupcake pan with cupcake liners.
In a medium-to-large bowl, stir together pumpkin, oil, sugar, milk, and vanilla. Sift in the dry ingredients and stir until combined.
Fill liners 2/3 full and bake for 20 – 24 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool completely on a cooling rack before frosting. If you’re going the coffee route, it’s easier to brush the tops with it while they’re still warm-ish.
For the frosting:
4 oz. cream cheese, softened
1 tsp. cinnamon (attention, cinnamon lovers: my teaspoon was heaping to the point of being nearly 2 tsp.)
2 to 3 cups powdered sugar, depending on desired consistency
1 tsp. vanilla extract
In a medium-sized bowl, beat the cream cheese and cinnamon on medium-high speed until smooth and well combined, about 2 minutes.
Sift in the powdered sugar and beat until combined, adding more as needed to achieve the consistency you want.
Add the vanilla and beat on high speed until well combined and creamy. Frost your cupcakes, and marvel at the flavour explosion.
If cinnamon isn’t your thing, these are also great topped with a whipped cream topping like I did here.
And now, back to holiday crafting. Thanks for looking! 🙂
The Witty Child 