Pumpkin Cupcakes

As it was Halloween yesterday, we decided to carve our own pumpkins.

So we had some great looking scary pumpkins, but that left me wondering what I should create out of the extra pumpkin flesh. I found inspiration from one of my favourite books; The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.

All of the pink bits of paper at the bottom of the book are in fact book marks - Gav has been through this book, bookmarking everything he would like made :) This recipe is one of them.

Ingredients:
For the cake:
120g Plain Flour
140g Caster Sugar
1tbsp Baking Powder
1 1/2tsp Ground Cinnamon
Pinch of Salt
40g Unsalted Butter
120ml Milk
2 Eggs
200g Pumpkin Puree
For the icing:
300g Icing Sugar
50g Unsalted Butter
125g Cream Cheese

I actually doubled this recipe, because I had been intending to take some into work for the cake day. 

I started off by boiling the pumpkin flesh until soft (it took about 30 minutes), I left it in a colander whilst it cooled and drained as much water from it as I could. When it was cold, I blended it into a purée.

Then, I mixed together the flour, sugar, cinnamon, salt and butter (at which point I realised that I still had not purchased a bigger bowl). I gradually added the milk and then the eggs. The recipe suggested that I mixed the pumpkin purée into the mixture by hand, I respectfully ignored that advice and gently mixed it in with a spoon. 

After spooning the mixture into a batch of 12 cases I remembered that doubling a recipe that gives you 12, does not always produce 24, baking is in a whole world of it's own and the rules of mathematics do not apply in the same way. I know this, but I never learn. I filled 42 cases with this mixture.

The first 12 did not rise as they should have. The first clue should have been that the mixture was runnier than I had anticipated, as I measured everything out, I assum that it was the pumpkin. It could have been a watery pumpkin or I may not have drained away as much as I thought. Either way, I faced a problem. Before spooning the next 12 into cases I added a couple of tablespoons of Self Raising Flour. This still did not work, they came out of the oven flat. I only had enough mixture to fill 18 more cases, I switched from paper cases to silicon ones, turned the oven down by 10 degrees and kept them in for a little longer. Success! the last 18 came out perfectly.

Whilst waiting for them to cool I was going to start the icing, however I quickly found that I had no icing sugar and therefore the cakes would not make it to work the next day. Instead I iced them this evening, combining the icing ingredients and adding some orange food colouring for that extra festive Halloween feel. I also topped them with a dusting of cinnamon as the recipe recommended.

They were a hit, although pumpkins are not one of the first ingredients you would think to put in a cupcake, if you are stuck with some pumpkin at Halloween and wonder what to do with it - I would recommend giving this recipe a try and any others in The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.