When we talk about cupcakes, we always think about a cake full of butter and sugar. Well, the advantage of making your cupcakes at home is that you get to choose your ingredients. In this case, Carrefour asked me to prepare a cupcake recipe with seasonal ingredients, so I inmediately thought about these pumpkin cupcakes which where originally published in my second book “Happy Cupcakes”.
As it was a book intended for kids, I tried to keep the recipe as healthy as posible (bearing in mind that we are talking about cupcakes). There is no butter in these cupcakes, no fondant, and thanks to the pumpkin which is added to the batter, which is sweet and moist, we can drastically reduce the amount of sugar and oil in the recipe.
The decoration you’ve probably seen it in many blogs, just in this case it is not made with fondant, but with homemade marzipan. It is so easy to make that even a four year old kid (with help!) can prepare these Halloween pumpkin cupcakes by himself. Below you can find a step by step made with my son Pablo when he was 4 years old (I miss those chubby hands!)
And also here you can find a video (in Spanish) I made for Carrefour showing how to prepare this recipe. I hope you like it!
{Pumpkin Cupcakes}
Prep time: 20 min
Cooking time: 15 min
Serves: cupcakes
Ingredients
- 250 g grated pumpkin
- 4 eggs
- 75 g vegetable oil
- 150 g sugar
- 200 g flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tbs cinnamon
- 150 g cream cheese
- 3 heaped tbs icing sugar
- 200 g icing sugar
- 200 g ground almond
- 1 egg white
- orange, green and brown food colouring
For the cake:
Cheese frosting:
Marzipan pumpkins:
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350º F (180º C). Line cupcake pans with paper liners; set aside. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and allspice; set aside.
- In a large bowl, whisk together sugar and eggs until pale and fluffy.
- Add oil, and mix well.
- Add dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon), and whisk until smooth.
- Whisk in pumpkin puree.
- Prepare cream cheese frosting just by beating cream cheese and confectioners’ sugar with a mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy,. Keep in the fridge until ready to use
- Prepare the marzipan pupmkins. You can use storebought, or prepared it by kneading together sugar, ground almond and egg white. Mix the marzipan and food colouring to get the colour you want and then roll into a ball
- Press the top of the ball just slightly so that it is not a perfect sphere, and make a hole at the top with your toothpick. Then starting at the hole just gently run the toothpick along the side. Create stems by rolling bits of marzipan, and press into top of each pumpkin. Then with some green marzipan roll it into a thin snake and swirl it around a toothpick
- Pipe or spread frosting over each cupcake. Top with a marzipan pumpkin just before serving. Store in refrigerator in an airtight container. Bring nearly to room temp before serving
NOTES:
- You might use fondant instead of marzipan
- This recipe is included in my book Happy Cupcakes. Remember my new book “Chocolate” is available in Amazon and in The book depository, with a 10% discount and free delivery worldwide (in Spanish)
- If you have prepared this recipe, and want to send me a pic and your comments, please use this form . If you wish to subscribe to receive my recipes in English please do it here
These are adorable! What a fun autumn treat.
Beautiful post, Happy Halloween!