MSC: Pumpkin Patch Cupcakes

This month's MSC selection was chosen by Kim of What the Whisk: pumpkin patch cupcakes!! To say that I love pumpkin in baked goods would be a bit of an understatement. A few weeks ago I started hearing rumors that there would be a shortage of canned pumpkin this year and I panicked. I only had one can of pumpkin leftover from last year and I knew that wouldn't be enough, so I started keeping an eye out for canned pumpkin in the store. For a while all I found were bare shelves, but finally, I came upon a glorious site - boxes and boxes of canned pumpkin! I stocked up but since then I've seen plenty of pumpkin so I'm not sure about the accuracy of those initial rumors.

The full recipe yields 32 cupcakes and that's a lot, especially since I've been baking like crazy, so I decided to quarter this recipe, which yielded 8 cupcakes. The pumpkin is one obvious fall ingredient in the cupcakes, but there are others: great fall spices, including cinnamon, ginger, clove and nutmeg. The batter was a gorgeous light orange color and as they baked my house just smelled better and better.

Martha tops these with her cream cheese frosting, which I've now made 3 separate times. It is, without a doubt, my favorite frosting ever. The kind of frosting you want to eat out of the bowl with a spoon, not that I'd ever do that :) I borrowed an idea from the wonderful Hello, Cupcake! book to decorate the cupcakes. Well, I should say I borrowed a portion of an idea. I tinted most of the frosting a light orange color and just a bit a few shades darker. The light orange frosting covers the cupcakes and the darker orange is used to create the ribs. The stems of the pumpkins are made by cutting green Twizzlers (which you can find in the rainbow package of Twizzlers). In the Hello, Cupcake! book, they cover the pumpkin cupcakes with orange colored sanding sugar, but despite visiting 4 stores yesterday, I couldn't find any. Margaret gave me a great idea to tint white sanding sugar, but I was running out of light to photograph so I didn't get to try it this time. I thought these turned out cute, but the orange sanding sugar would have made them even better: shiny and sparkly pumpkins!

Ok, but how did they taste? Amazing!! I loved the cupcakes. Spicy and tender, they were the perfect fall treat! Many thanks to Kim for hosting this week's fun selection! To try this recipe, pick up a copy of Martha's Cupcake book and please stop by our site to see how the other bakers fared with their cupcakes!