Fresh Pumpkin Cupcakes with White Chocolate Chunks and Cream Cheese Frosting

A very good friend came to my house, made a mess of my kitchen making pumpkin muffins and left me with tons of leftover pumpkin meat. The nerve! So, what did I do? Make pumpkin cupcakes, of course.

This is a relatively simple recipe, easy to do, but yummy none the less. Very much like a carrot cake, the pumpkin flavor is subtle and the spices stand out. The cupcakes are not very sweet so the addition of the white chocolate is nice while not being overbearing. I topped them off with a standard cream cheese frosting from a recipe that can be found elsewhere on the blog.

Just a simple, tasty recipe for those leftover pumpkins…

I wanted to mention a couple of other things while I am at it…

Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the Worldis a new and unique cupcake cookbook with all vegan recipes. I contributed a recipe for vegan lychee-coconut cupcakes that can be found on page 122. I haven’t received my copy yet, so I can’t tell you much more about it, but I am really looking forward to checking it out. For those of you that have asked about dairy or egg-free recipes, this is the cookbook for you. I also hear that there are some gluten-free recipes as well.

I got an email about a new product. I rarely mention these types of things on the blog, as there are other venues for that, but I am terribly excited about this one. The Cupcake Courier seems like the perfect answer to, “How am I going to get a load of cupcakes to work without damaging them?” Normally I buy the disposable, plastic cupcake containers, but still need to find an appropriately sized bag, etc. I am really looking forward to seeing how well this works for carting cupcakes on the Vespa.

Pumpkin Cupcakes
24 regular cupcakes / 350 degree oven

3 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
2 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
4 cups shredded fresh pumpkin
4 ounces white chocolate, chopped

1. Cut open a pumpkin, take out the seeds and inner flesh, then chop into manageable chunks. Grate the pumpkin chunks, skin and all, with a box grated or food processor until you have four cups of grated flesh.
2. Measure the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg into a medium sized bowl and whisk to combine.
3. Measure the sugar, oil, eggs, and vanilla into a large size bowl and stir to combine.
4. Add about a fourth of the dry mixture to the wet and stir to combine. Continue adding in fourths until all the dry is incorporated. The result with be a very thick batter (and a sore arm).
5. Fold in the pumpkin and chocolate chunks into the batter and scoop into cupcake papers about 2/3s full.
6. Bake at 350 degrees for about 25-30 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean.

Assemble
1. Top cooled cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.
2. I decorated the cupcakes with store bought pumpkin candies for the sake of time (and because I actually love/hate those both those and candy corn), but you could always get creative with marzipan if you have the time and inclination.